From today's NY Times...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/w...s-a-mystery-that-sinks-island-hopes.html?_r=0
1/12/14 Rising Tide Is a Mystery That Sinks Island Hopes - NYTimes.com
Rising Tide Is a Mystery That Sinks Island Hopes
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD JAN. 11, 2014
LAGO ENRIQUILLO, Dominican Republic — Steadily, mysteriously, like
in an especially slow science fiction movie, the largest lake in the
Caribbean has been rising and rising, devouring tens of thousands of acres
of farmland, ranches and whatever else stands in its way.
Lago Enriquillo swallowed Juan Malmolejos’s banana grove. It
swamped Teodoro Pe?a’s yuccas and mango trees. In the low-lying city of
Boca de Cachon, the lake so threatens to subsume the entire town that the
government has sent the army to rebuild it from scratch on a dusty plain
several miles away.
Jose Joaquin Diaz believes that the lake took the life of his brother,
Victor. Victor committed suicide, he said, shortly after returning from a
life abroad to see the family cattle farm, the one begun by his grandfather,
underwater.
“He could not believe it was all gone, and the sadness was too much,”
Mr. Diaz said, as a couple of men rowed a fishing boat over what had been
a pasture.
Theories abound, but a conclusive answer remains elusive as to why
the lake — as well as its nearby sibling in Haiti, Lac Azuei, which now
spills over the border between the two on the island of Hispaniola — has
risen so much. Researchers say the surge may have few if any precedents
worldwide.
“There are no records, to the best of our knowledge, of such sudden
growth of lakes of similar size,” said Jorge E. Gonzalez, a City College of1/12/14 Rising Tide Is a Mystery That Sinks Island Hopes - NYTimes.com
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New York engineering professor who is helping to lead a consortium of
scientists from the United States and the Dominican Republic studying the
phenomenon.
Other lakes have grown, from melting glaciers and other factors, Mr.
Gonzalez said, but “the growth rates of these two lakes in Hispaniola has
no precedent.”
The lakes, salty vestiges of an ancient oceanic channel known for their
crocodiles and iguanas, have always had high and low periods, but
researchers believe they have never before gotten this large. The waters
began rising a decade ago, and now Enriquillo has nearly doubled in size
to about 135 square miles, Mr. Gonzalez said, roughly the size of Atlanta,
though relatively light rains in the past year have slowed its expansion.
Azuei has grown nearly 40 percent in that time, to about 52 square miles,
according to the consortium.
The scientists, partly financed by the National Science Foundation,
are focusing on changing climate patterns as the main culprit, with a
noted rise in rainfall in the area attributed to warming in the Caribbean
Sea.
In reports, they have noted a series of particularly heavy storms in
2007 and 2008 that swamped the lakes and the watersheds that feed
them, though other possible contributing factors are also being studied,
including whether new underground springs have emerged.
“People talk about climate change adaptation, well, this is what’s
coming, if it’s coming,” said Yolanda Leon, a Dominican scientist working
on the lake research.
The rise has taken a toll, particularly around Enriquillo, an area more
populated than that around Azuei.
The government estimates that 40,000 acres of agricultural land have
been lost, affecting several thousand families who have lost all or part of
their only livelihood of yucca, banana and cattle farming. The town of
Boca de Cachon at the lake’s edge is in particular peril, with some houses
already lost, and the government is bulldozing acres of land for new farms.
A main highway to the Haitian border was flooded and had to be
diverted, while another road around the perimeter of the lake now ends
abruptly in the water.
Local residents are skeptical that the government will follow through,
and they question whether the soil will be as good as the parcels near the
lake that drew generations of farmers in the first place.
Olgo Fernandez, the director of the country’s hydraulic resources
institute, waved off the criticism and said the government had carefully
planned the new community and plots to ensure the area remains an
agriculture hotbed. It will be completed this year, officials said, though on
a recent afternoon there was much work left to be done.
“These will be lands that will produce as well as, if not better than, the
lands they previously had,” Mr. Fernandez said.
Row upon row of cookie-cutter, three-bedroom, cinder-block houses
— 537 in all — are being built in the new town, which will include a
baseball field, church, schools, community center, parks, even a helicopter
landing pad (“for visiting dignitaries,” an official explained).
Environmental controls will make it “the greenest town in the Dominican
Republic,” said Maj. Gen. Rafael Emilio de Luna, who is overseeing the
work.
For now, though, at the ever-creeping edge of the lake, the ghostly
trunks of dead palm trees mark submerged farms.
Junior Moral Medina, 27, who lives in Boca, plans to move to the new
community. He looked out on a recent day on an area where his 10-acre
farm had been, now a pool of lake water studded with dead palms.
“We have been worried the whole town would disappear,” said Mr.
Medina, who now works on the construction site for the new town. “Some
people at first did not want to leave this area, but the water kept rising and
made everybody scared.”
Residents in other communities are growing impatient and worry they
will not be compensated for their losses.
Enrique Diaz Mendez has run a small grocery stand in Jaragua since1/12/14 Rising Tide Is a Mystery That Sinks Island Hopes -
losing half of his six acres of yucca and plantain crops to Enriquillo. “We
are down to almost nothing,” he said.
Jose Joaquin Diaz and his brother, Victor, grew up tending to the
sheep, goats and cows of the family farm, but both left the Dominican
Republic for the United States for better opportunity. Jose returned first,
and three years ago Victor arrived, looking forward to the slower pace of
life after working an array of jobs over 18 years in Brooklyn.
“We told him about the lake, but he was shocked when he saw it,”
Jose recalled, tears welling with the memory.
Later that night, Victor called his mother to express his dismay. The
next morning he was found hanging in a relative’s apartment in Santo
Domingo where he was staying. “It is strange to see people fishing where
we had the cows,” Mr. Diaz said. “Victor could not bear it.”
Ezra Fieser contributed reporting from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
A version of this article appears in print on January 12, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition
with the headline: Rising Tide Is a Mystery That Sinks Island Hopes.
? 2014 The New York Times Company