Just when I thought my recent post on the Venezuela drought was dead and buried a comment appeared. It was posted by Miguel Octavio, a physicist by training who lives in Miami but who visits Venezuela frequently, and it linked to a follow-up post on Miguel’s blog that contained a lot of local rainfall and stream flow data that weren’t available to me but which prove beyond any doubt that there is no drought at or around the El Guri dam. This post presents Miguel’s post in its entirety and adds two other items as footnotes:
- A video claiming that Venezuelan authorities are undermining a rockfill dam to supply more water to the El Guri turbines, thereby threatening the dam’s integrity. (Note that Energy Matters cannot confirm the veracity of this claim).
- A revealing Twitter exchange between Miguel and Luis Motta Dominguez, Venezuela’s Minister for Electricity and Energy, who refuses to acknowledge that there isn’t a drought despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Is Drought Really Causing The Problems With Guri Dam?
April 17, 2016
The title of this post may seem strange to some, when you look, for example, at the pictures in this Reuters report, it certainly seems like there is a drought in Guri, except that if the pictures were of the bottom of the now half -dry lake that forms the dam, it is obvious that it will look dead and drought-like in the pictures.
When I was in Caracas, someone told me that they had gone fishing in one of the tributaries of the river Caroni and the water level was quite high, something that was later confirmed by another friend who went fishing in the La Paragua river and saw the water level rise by a meter in a few days.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
