This article below from our country’s major newspaper didn’t get much is right the details, in fact they were all wrong, but we did make the paper.

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My employees were on the truck (noted in the paper), they were coming from a soccer match in which the girl’s semi-professional brothers played. There were no Nica’s (Nicaraguans) on the truck, they are all Costa Rican and packed into the bed like sardines. Typical for a poor town where only one farmer has a truck, everyone gets a ride while on the dirt road.

As they were on the approach to the bridge that spans the Rio Atirro, two Nicaraguan coffee workers from a neighbor’s coffee farm came running warning them off, they were about to cross the bridge, saw the several stories high head water (tsunami) coming down the river and were running for their lives.

The truck, filled with family and neighbors in the bed, headed for higher ground but did not make it very far, they ended up surrounded by a river that changed course in a few seconds.

By divine grace they stranded on the only little piece of dry land that was to remain with racing head and flood waters surrounding them.

The bridge is still standing, there is no river under it, not even a stream now. There is a whole new river course leaving the bridge high and dry, the dikes are gone, as is the road. The road is not just gone, it is 20 feet or more straight down to where it used to be, a sheer drop-off, and covered with a river, the new Rio Atirro.

How this will be fixed will be an engineering miracle. Two small mountain villages of people have no way to traverse in or out. It is the beginning of the rainy season for a job best done during the dry season. This past weekend’s rain was a 10 or 20 year event. Not a normal wet weather happening.

In La Esperanza it was a hard blowing sideways rain from the South. To the South is the Cabecar Reservation and even higher mountains. Their rain was most likely even harder than ours (normal for them) and as these water run down the mountains they take everything in their path. Those head waters and what came later were 100′ trees and boulders, had the river not changed course, the bridge would be gone.

The sugar cane fields where the river went to, are wiped out. Mowed down like they were never there. Along the national road from the bus stop at the bottom of my mountain and towards Atirro and the sugar mill, the river trampled over the road and was violent.

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What a mess!

Logs and rocks, road falling away, cane fields destroyed, we had a tsunami, it came down from 6,000 ft or more above us, past us, down our mountain, and across the sugar cane fields. Unlike a tsumani from the ocean, this one just kept coming. It is a miracle that no one died from this day of destruction. In a flash your life can be altered forever…

As we watched the river from the safety of our home, it rose to a level never seen by us before. The torrential waters, trees and rainforest debris picked up along the way smashed boulders and sprayed 15′ up into the air.

What a sight to behold, we just kept saying… “Unbelievable!”

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Written by Ginnee Hancock who lives on her very rural farm in La Esperanza de Atirro, Turrialba, Costa Rica and with her husband where they raise cattle, bamboo, organic veggies, bananas and other fruit. This is their best life, a dream they did not know they had, come true. You can see Ginnee’s blog here.

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