Flooding In Papua

So I’m really impressed with the power of flooding but never have I been so impressed as today with human's ability to improvise in the face of disaster.   This picture is from this morning at about 9:30 am about a mile from our house.    About 7-10 inches of rain fell last night in about a 3 hour period with a drizzle the rest of the night.   At 9:30 they were running motorcycles and medical workers up and down a plank.

By 3:30 in the afternoon the same bridge was “fixed” when some local construction workers dumped large rocks and gravel on this ruined bridge.

We thought we’d be cut off from Sentani for days but the locals say this flood was “nothing compared to the past flooding.”   The opposite direction from our home we had to stop at this bridge that was washed out.

But if you look carefully to the left hand side you’ll discover that once again human ingenuity has triumphed.   They have made a ford through the now tiny creek that last night washed homes and unfortunately lives into their end.  Take a look at this photo just 90 degrees to the left of the one above.  Literally this was only a 10 foot wide creek before last night but it washed to more than 50 feet wide taking at least 3 houses with it on the right bank of the river.

Adventist Aviation lost about 10 feet of the end of its runway and the flood wall that goes around the end.   This is normally a small creek but the banks on both side were eroded back by 20 or more feet or more and over flowing the banks making this a 100 foot wide river.

We are trying to find out who lost homes and what lives were lost but its hard to find the real true stories from the rumors. 

As we surveyed the damage this afternoon I kept saying to my family.   If this was America they’d have called the national Guard and cut all traffic while they called an expensive engineering firm to check to see what the options were for the bridges.  Not here, no sir, just let some men who normally sit on their front porches chewing bettle-nut have a 30 second meeting with their brother-in-law and soon they are calling their friend, who knows a friend, who calls his boss, who calls the owner and they have a few loads of rocks and a big track hoe on site in 2 hours and by 5 hours latter all is well.   Who said the third world can’t move fast when necessity forces them.

The amazing thing was I slept through all the rain and thunder and lightening.   Please join us in prayer for those who lost things and family in this flood.   I’ll post more if we learn of any specific ways we can help those who are suffering right now.   Probably lack of pure water is the biggest problem right now.