Patterns

There is something comforting about having a regular pattern in life, though it does decrease the enthusiasm for writing about it. M-F I ride to work in the morning, enjoy a very basic almuerzo at the cafeteria next to my building (everyone takes the time each day to have a meal together at lunchtime, a tradition that seems counter to the intense "I'll eat a sandwich at my desk while working and therefore be more productive" wheel-spinning that governs my life back North), and ride my bike home around 5 or 6 pm. A couple of times per week we meet up at a pool and swim for an hour or so. So you see, there's not much interesting there.

 I have only had one real work-related field trip, to a town called Ovalle up north, near La Serena. It's in the Elqui valley, known for its wine and other produce, and for attracting an eclectic crowd of new agey visitors. I of course was more taken by the civil infrastructure we visited, a dam, small hydropower plant, diversion structures, and of course, penstocks. I don't think it is so much about conquering nature or anything so overtly masculine like that. But seeing a steel pipe running down a steep hillside in the Andes, carrying little flow but at a tremendous pressure, I appreciate the power of nature, and seeing how we can take a piece of that to generate energy to do something really useful, like run a television set or crush grapes into pisco. I also have a desire to take my hydraulics class here to show them these incredible installations.

That's not to say I'm swayed by the massive hydropower projects being crammed down the public's throat here, about which I defer to the sober, thoughtful reflections of Dr. Peter Goodwin, someone I was fortunate to take some classes from at UC Berkeley long ago. For hydropower, it seems that scale is important.

The picture below shows one reason why large dams can be problematic here: in a dynamic landscape like this there is tremendous erosion and sediment transport down the rivers. the river bed and valley here are meters deep in loose gravel and sand, which will diminish, or at least complicate, the ability of a large dam to provide a long-term sustainable solution to energy or water supply. A couple of days ago I visited in the civil engineering department at the Católica a physical model of a proposed dam that included a few measures to try to cope with the sediment load that would enter the dam. Not an easy problem to solve. Not for me, anyway.