ICE Blamed for Highway Damage

Local residents of El Diquis in Puntarenas province are blaming ICE, the national power company, at least partly for closure of the InterAmerican Highway south of the capital. They charged that the power company changed the course of the Terraba River, undermining the highway.

Machinery contracted by Conavi, the highway safety council, is at work and the highway is expected to be passable next week. On Thursday, one rough lane was opened to allow cars to creep past but no heavy vehicles.

Residents of El Diquis told the newspaper La Nacion that ICE had established a rock quarry in the river bottom to extract building materials. To give their heavy excavating machinery a firm base, the power company built a sort of dike 600 meters upriver from the cave-off on the highway.

This caused the river to eat away  a 100-meter stretch of the road, residents charge. But Franklin Avila, director of ICE's El Diquis Dam project, blames heavy rains that have swollen the river.

He claims he warned Conavi last September in writing of the road's vulnerability to damage, using aerial photos taken in 2009. La Nacion quoted longtime resident Hilda Granados as confirming Avila's thesis that that the route has had problems in years past due to river flooding.

But Granados was not letting ICE completely off the hook. "It isn't the direct fault of ICE," she said, but added that their quarry caused the water to be channeled with more force against the embankment below the pavement.

Suspicion of ICE is understandable from residents around the new El Diquis Dam. Earlier this year, after months of filling the reservoir, residents noted suspicious cracks developing in the ground around their homes. ICE engineers denied that the new body of water had anything to do with it.

Finally, a team of university geologists confirmed that the rising of ground water had undermined the slope at the edge of the reservoir. But this happened only after several houses had suffered damage.

The residents laughed off the original ICE suggestion that they fill the cracks with clay. After the geologists had backed the the inhabitants' viewpoint, ICE promised to replace their damaged homes.