<strong>by Rod Hughes</strong>

A series of sharp tremors shook up southern Costa Rica near the Panama border yesterday, causing no reported deaths and only minor injuries but damaging roads and 17 homes. The epicenter if the quakes was in the Pacific Ocean and registered from 6 to 4.6 on the Richter scale.

The strongest of the tremors hit shortly after 9 a.m. yesterday. In the town of Corredores, the roof of the school came down. Between that hour and 10:30, another three sharp aftershocks jarred residents. Golfito and Puerto Jimenez also felt the quake, the epicenter of which was 30 kilometers south of Corredores in an active undersea fault.

In Rio Incendio, Elisabeth Gomez luckily escaped with bruises when part of her home fell on her. In a nearby home, the roof fell on a gas cylinder in the kitchen, setting fire to the ruins. The hospital at Ciudad Neily chose not to receive regular patients and kept open only the emergency room.

by Rod Hughes

After a scorched earth retreat of months against determined opposition from almost all the sports federations that wanted him gone since last November, Jorge Nery Carvajal resigned as head of the National Olympic Committee. By stepping down, he ended 22 years of association with the supreme amateur sports organization in the country.

The power struggle bid well to become the soap opera of the year and threatened to assure that no Costa Rican could get anything but private financing to journey to the Peking Olympic Games in August. Currently five athletes have qualified to go. At the end, the PanAmerican Sports Organization engineered the resignation in a special board session.

Carvajal admitted that he resigned only to avoid having the PanAmerican sports group sanction the national committee. In his last days, not a single sports federation would publicly come to his defense. The majority of federations openly criticized his allegedly high-handed administration in which he named to hierarchy of the committee. Then, at a recent meeting, he abruptly terminated a regular board meeting after negotiations with the opposition broke down.

His principal opponent, Henry Nunez, refrained from running for committee chairman to facilitate Carvajal’s exit, according to the daily La Nacion. Roberto Verdesia, by a vote of 31-9, will be chairman until September (after the summer Olympics) when a more stable group of officers will be elected. Other officials are secretary Martin Faba (bowling), treasurer Alexander Zamora (pingpong), while other officials represent swimming, horsemanship and wrestling.

by Rod Hughes

In a perfect example of the right hand not knowing the doings of the left one, the national power and light company (CNFL) invested $4 million to buy land for the construction of a dam ruled not feasible by its parent company, the Costa ican Electrical Institute (ICE), the daily paper La Nacion revealed today.

ICE pulled the plug on the dam project 18 kilometers north of San Ramon but not before CNFL’s investment. ICE is the power and light company’s principal stockholder. Since 2003, CNFL had been urging the construction of the dam, to be roughly the size of the currently existing 132 megawatt producing Cachi reservoir, which produces enough power for 100,000 homes.

The completed Balsa Superior project was to have cost about $300 million and to have had 25 kilometers of expensive tunnels. The dam at Pirris near Turrialba, by contrast, has only 10.5 kilometers of tunnels but produces the same megawattage as Balsa Superior was to have generated. Said Pedro Pablo Quiros, ICE’s CEO, where so many tunnels are needed, it means there is less water available.

Yet, the project would have collected water from six rivers and CNFL engineering estimates optimisticly put the reservoir size at equal to Cachi. Quiros summed up the possible lack of generating flow this way: “It was sensible to stop something that lacks reasonable viability from the risk analysis point of view. This was the conclusion without blame nor glory.”

Quiros said that CNFL would have to sell the property so that it would not be (pardon the expression) money down the drain. “These projects are so expensive,” he added, “that $4 million must not be an excuse to say, ‘better we go ahead (with it.)’”