3. There are no hurricanes in Chile, but…

While I was researching Chile in the lead-up to my year here, one of the most attractive things for me was that there are NO HURRICANES in this country. As someone who has lived most of his life on the US Third Coast, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time watching the Weather Channel like it was tracking Lord Voldemort, stocking up bottled water, and trying to decide whether I should literally head for the hills.

            Unlike the Gulf of Mexico, however, conditions here are non-conducive to hurricane formation. The movement of tropical weather systems is usually strongly skewed from the East to the West, and Chile is on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean; hurricanes require warm water, and the oceans in the southern hemisphere are in general colder than in the northern hemisphere (especially the shallow Gulf of Mexico), because there’s a lot more water to heat down here; and the atmospheric winds are much stronger in the southern hemisphere, because there is less land to drag against them, which tends to blow storm systems apart. Also, while water in the toilets does not actually spin clockwise in the southern hemisphere due to the Coriolis effect, tropical cyclones, when they are able to form, DO spin clockwise. This doesn’t have anything to do with why Chile doesn’t get hurricanes, but it makes an eye-catching picture for someone who has seen a thousand counter-clockwise satellite images:

Anyway, while Australia and New Zealand occasionally have to look out for hurricanes and even Brazil seems to have got one once, Chile seems to have never recorded a hurricane landing. I would mention this to people who were worried about me leaving Houston to live in South America for a year to take some edge off their fears, but the response was always the same: “Sure, no hurricanes, but they have earthquakes. You can’t predict an earthquake.”

            I began writing this post in my head a while ago, ready to tell the story of living through a temblor in Chile. What has happened instead is we got something that looks an awful lot like a hurricane.

            It’s the rainy time of year in this part of Chile, and apparently it has been quite a dry one. The news on Monday was predicting a rainy week, and I thought oh, great, maybe that’ll help with the drought. It was mostly cloudy and misty on Tuesday, but on Thursday it began what I would call a light drizzle. I had just gotten to school when the postdoc who has been helping me with research called, telling me not to leave home and if I had, to go back as soon as possible, because very hard rains were expected and I might end up stranded if the streets flooded and the buses couldn’t run. It didn’t look that bad to me; in fact, I didn’t even take any pictures because it looked so benign. I decided, however, that as a foreigner I might be ahead to take the natives’ advice, and that my productivity might actually be improved if I could read about my bacteria in bed or on the sofa instead of a cold, empty meeting room.

           The forecasters were predicting about 2-4 inches of rain on Thursday, and it had rained about an inch already (over something like 12 hours) when I took the bus home. Having lived in Houston, where it is fairly normal to get an inch in an hour, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The streets were already beginning to flood in the middle of town, and once the bus began climbing up the hill to my apartment, it was like driving through a river. The whole road was covered in water cascading down to the ocean, and the bus’s tires pushing through it cast water up seven or eight feet into the air, drenching anyone waiting at the stops or trying to walk.

            Things were clearer on Friday, but Saturday we woke up with no power or water in the apartment. The storms had come in that night with such strong winds that the electrical grid for the entire region had been badly damaged, and the floods in the valley and landslides and fallen trees on the hills were making everything hard to repair. We were totally fine on top of our hill, I should stress, but there was an awful lot of damage in neighboring Viña del Mar, lots of flooded homes and washed-out roads. It continued to rain “a little” and flood a lot most of the day, but the power was eventually restored to our apartment around 6:00pm. It just goes to show that everything is relative: what would be a

little storm in Houston was enough to shut down Valparaíso most of the day. And it makes me wonder, having lived through the heaviest rain in Houston in fifty years and the floods in Chile in the same summer, if someone might be interested in paying me to spend some time in California!

Needless to say, Yandee and I did not make it to the beach this week. I have, however, learned a lot about purple photosynthetic bacteria. We will be using them to produce hydrogen gas, which is in a lot of ways even cooler than biodiesel, because it doesn’t require as much processing to purify, and it does not use carbon at all; the carbon from the wastewater feedstock is all locked into the bacteria’s biomass, making this process potentially carbon negative instead of carbon neutral. Hydrogen also burns much cleaner than any carbon fuel - if we could produce enough to power our cars, there would be no carbon monoxide produced as exhaust, no soot, only water vapor. But that kind of discussion is getting a little too far ahead – first we have to find out if we can get more energy out of the bacteria in the form of hydrogen than we put into them.

Next time: Earthquakes, who knows??

Previously: First week of school