outdoors

As these words were being typed, at about quarter to eleven on April 26 (so NOW you know how this journalist tends to spend his Saturday nights!), Panama City was receiving its heaviest rainstorm of the year. We got a little shower the day after Easter, but since late December Panama has had one of its driest dry seasons ever. Color that parched brown, dessicated yellow, brushfire blackened and clay-turned-to-dust red.

It has meant selected water utility cutoffs in the middle of the night, fights between residential areas of Tocumen over which neighborhood will get water pressure when, nonstop electrical brownouts as hydroelectric power has dwindled, ANAM having to move in to rescue starving caymen from dried-up lakes in the Interior, an unwanted delay in putting in this year’s garden.

It has not, however, meant draft restrictions on Panama Canal shipping. It takes 52 million gallons of fresh water flowing out to sea to put a vessel through the canal’s gravity-powered locks. The canal uses far more water than the people and businesses alongside it. When water shortages get bad enough, then less water is allowed to flow from Gatun Lake through the Gatun Locks into the Caribbean Sea and from Miraflores Lake through the Miraflores Locks into the Pacific Ocean. That means ships have to ride higher on the water, which in turn means that they must bear lighter loads, which in turn means that ship owners make less money and shippers find it less convenient to send their wares through the Panama Canal. Draft restrictions are a naturally occurring economic disaster on the manufactured waterway.

The calendar says that rainy season officially starts on April 29. Panama Canal Authority meteorologists figure that we will get enough rain to run the locks at normal water levels this year, even if the ground wasn’t sufficiently softened for me to spade up the garden at the usual time.

So come on, rain! Don’t slow down now --- you’ve only been coming down in sheets for half an hour.

Ah, well. Better that we start the season with a few days of gentle rain, rather than sudden torrents that turn hard pan into mud slides and convert city drains into death traps that drown little kids. Still, I’m hoping for more precipitation before you read these words.

(Postscript: In fact, the rain did pick up during the night and wee hours of the morning, such that the Muchachas Guias building, in which our offices are located, had water on the floor and a power outage when I returned to work on this issue. Though they may slightly delay our uploading of this issue, these inconveniences were worth it.)

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