Thursday, May 10, 2012

Residents Trickle Back to Ruins of Gramalote, Colombia

Gramalote, Colombia, a town of 2,900, was destroyed in December 2010 as the ground began to move after heavy rains

GRAMALOTE, Colombia — Much of the time, the only sound in this town’s once-idyllic main square is the chatter of birds perching in the cracked church tower and the tap-tap-tap of hammers wielded by men furtively stripping away the last items of any value: a piece of rebar pried from a ceiling, loose bricks knocked from crumbling walls.

This town of 2,900 people was destroyed shortly before Christmas in 2010 in a natural disaster that was remarkable even in a country that has known its share of catastrophic mudslides, floods and volcanic eruptions.

Surrounded by steep hills, Gramalote sits on a geologic fault whose movements have helped create unstable layers of broken rock and soil. After days of exceptionally heavy rain that December, the saturated ground began to move, not all at once as in a mudslide but slowly downhill at a rate of about 13 feet per hour. Geologists say a series of small earthquakes may have contributed to the movement. Walls split open. Roofs caved in. Cracks, deep and long, opened in the earth. One of the twin bell towers on the church, the town’s beloved landmark, toppled over.

Even as the town’s 870 families were being evacuated, politicians rushed in with promises of aid. President Juan Manuel Santos pledged that a new Gramalote would be built, better than before. But the government said it would need to move the town to a safe spot, away from the steep hills and unstable soils that caused the disaster.

Now, nearly a year and a half later, Gramaloteros, as the residents are called, are losing patience. Dispersed to nearby towns and cities, struggling to pay rent and often unable to find work, they are slowly returning to the devastated town, to live among the ruins or at least in sight of them.

“Our being here keeps the town alive,” said Carmen Monguí, 40, who returned in January with her son and daughter. “If we leave, the town will definitely die.”

Ms. Monguí rented a small house in a cluster of about two dozen homes that were somehow spared. The neighborhood, called La Lomita, at the top of the town’s main street, has become the focus of life among the ruins.

Close to two dozen families returned within weeks of the disaster, but slowly that number has grown to about 35, local officials said.

Like many Gramalote refugees, Ms. Monguí had been living in Cúcuta, near the border with Venezuela. She paid rent of about $300 a month in Cúcuta, more than three times what she is paying now. There was no work for her in Cúcuta. In Gramalote, she makes a living selling clothing.

She is relieved to be back, but memories of the disaster haunt her. “Houses fell down like dollhouses,” she said. Now the rain makes her anxious, especially at night.

“That’s the fear, that you’ll be asleep and the same thing will happen again,” she said.

One of her neighbors, Blanca Rosa Gómez, 25, moved back last month and opened a small shop selling veterinary medicines, fertilizer and animal feed.

Ms. Gómez said that she did not often walk among the ruins.

“If you’re a masochist, you can go down to look around and remember,” she said.

Many people do just that.

On a recent morning, Marco Osorio, 49, drove from his home in Cúcuta to Gramalote. He was born here, and though he left as a child, he still feels a special connection to a place that represents a more traditional, rural past. It was his first visit since the disaster.

“We used to say that Gramaloteros may die but the town lives on,” Mr. Osorio said. “Now it’s the town that has died and we’re still alive.”

Gramalote today resembles a bombed-out city. Whole blocks have been reduced to rubble as local officials demolish buildings in danger of tumbling onto the roadway.

Elsewhere, buildings tilt helter-skelter. Horses graze in the rooms of roofless houses overgrown with weeds. A street ripples in frozen waves, and the one remaining tower of the marigold-yellow church leans precariously.

Gramalote was once an important market town in a farming region where coffee, oranges, bananas and other crops are grown. Now, many of the Gramaloteros who have come back scratch out a living scavenging building materials from the wreckage. The most lucrative pickings, like copper wire and thick steel beams, were hauled off months ago.

Men use sledgehammers to knock bricks or cinder blocks out of crumbling walls. One thousand bricks might fetch about $200. Or they bash away at concrete ceilings to uncover steel rebar, which sells for about 20 cents a foot.

Such scavenging went on in the open until late April, when a man was crushed to death as a wall collapsed while he was searching for materials to sell.

The man was the first to die in the ruins, local officials said. No one died in the original disaster, although residents say that many older refugees died in the following months, which they attribute to sadness more than anything else.

The police, who operate out of a rented house in La Lomita, responded to the death by enforcing a ban on scavenging. But many here are desperately poor and say scavenging is their only source of income.

Some scavengers have kept working despite the ban, although on a recent morning they stopped hammering when a lookout whistled to signal that two police officers were approaching on a motorcycle.

In April, Gramaloteros marched in Cúcuta to demand that the government fulfill its promise to build a new town.

Mayor Sonia Rodríguez Torrente, who took office in January, said the federal government had been slow to take action and had often left residents in the dark. But she said she hoped that a site for the new town would be chosen within the next four months and that work on the site could start by year’s end.

Ms. Rodríguez moved ahead this month with the demolition of government buildings like a high school and a culture center. But she said she would let the church stand as a symbol of the place and what happened here.

“We will let it fall on its own,” she said. “But we won’t touch it.”

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

NYT

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