Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover

Driving in Quito and getting lost is still my experience, a real ego-bruiser.

Coming from the plains where roads form a grid, I want roads that run straight, square and predicticable -- as symmetrical as the pattern on a plaid flannel shirt.

That just doesn’t happen in a city that winds around the base of a large mountain. But I DO ask for directions— not much of an option at The Trébol, where 60,000 cars a day pass through along with 1,100 busses.

El Trebol means The Cloverleaf, and in trying to find the toll road to San Rafael (with mounting anger in our car), we circled it two times. And THEN we caught the General Rumiñau toll road to Valle del Los Chillos and San Rafael.

Of course, a worse thing could have happened at the Trebol (please see the photo).

There was real trouble at The Trébol.



Hundreds of tons of earth simply fell away, leaving a giant hole big enough to swallow whole vehicles and then some. It is fortunate no one was injured.

With a lot of rain saturating the Trebol’s soil (which was fill material put in three or four decades ago) and the waters of the Machangara River pressuring the 400 meter concrete channel passing far beneath the Trebol, the fill fell down and was carried away by the river. Schools were cancelled for two days due to the traffic rerouting after the sinkhole occurred.

Was it the city’s lack of maintenance? “Not necessarily,” said Sixto Duran Ballen, who named three factors in the disaster: a) blockage of the river, b) lack of sewer maintenance and c) an extraordinarily large flow of water. (He was Quito’s mayor from 1970 to 1978, during which El Trebol was constructed. The fill material wasn't garbage, but instead layers of soil, packed after drying. Duran Ballen was elected president in 1992, the last elected chief executive to serve out a complete term in Ecuador.)

“Our problem in Quito,” he said, “and in all of Ecuador is that public works are not maintained. The policy is to think that earlier projects are no good. Schools and roads from an earlier government are not maintained. The sewers in Quito are an example. People sweep and throw garbage into the sewer grates. Probably part of what happened at El Trebol is that people continue to throw garbage in the Machangara, resulting in lack of maintaining the river and so the tunnels (beneath El Trebol) flooded.” (El Comercio 6 April 08)



Now, reconstruction work has been progressing for several weeks, with large excavators looking like Tonka toys inside the large crater on the east side of central Quito.
(The large diggers work on terraces that angle down at a 30 degree angle in the hole that is more than 100 feet deep.)

Hoy newspaper referred to it as a 60 million dollar project that could take six months and El Comercio newspaper reported that 70 percent of the Trebol is “stabilized.”



A new channel is being constructed, running parallel with the broken one but extending 200 meters longer. El Hoy put it this way: “It will run beneath the sector known as La Tola, in solid ground (I added emphasis by italicizing.)
(photo credits: El Comercio/Ultimas Noticias, H. Schirmacher)