by Rod Hughes

A young mother was killed Sunday when the car in which she was riding was hit by a landslide in the Acosta area. Her toddler daughter and others in the car managed to escape. Acosta is in the mountains south of San Jose.

Noilin Arias, 20, had accompanied her daughter and husband on a shopping trip to the capital. Upon their return by bus, they attempted to hire a taxi to take them home, but the drivers refused due to the heavy rain that was falling. Soliciting a ride in an SUV driven by her neice’s boyfriend, the family headed home, only to find the road blocked by a landslide near Cangrejal.

Forced to return, the driver found that the rains had swollen a creek crossing the road. Again turning around, they retraced their route on to be hit by a landslide 500 meters farther on. The others in the car escaped but Noilin was injured and trapped in the destroyed vehicle. Although rescued by another motorist, they were isolated by the dozens of slides that blocked the road. There she died of her injuries.

Others were more fortunate in this area of steep mountains. A company seminar of 50 persons fled their resort meeting place just minutes before an avalanche of mud and stone slammed into it.

by Rod Hughes

It’s a dirty business but someone has to do it. The Sitca S.A. company will treat garbage from the Carbbean port city of Limon plus the towns of Siquirres, Guacimo and Matina, sorting out the organic stuff for processing into gas fuel for home use, recycling the rest and leaving only 30% to place in a landfill.

For the municipalities, it’s a dream plan if it works the way it is presented—the company will actually pay $2 per ton to the municipalities that currently have to shell out $13 per ton to landfills. The only requisite for the towns is that the municipal governments must sign a $20-year contract.

Sitca will install four processing plants at a million dollars each. They will accept commercial waste but it must be non-toxic. For Limon, it will be a way out of a difficult situation where, in the past, residents have been stuck with the 1,600 tons of refuse generated monthly with nowhere to put it. Although the landfills are currently functioning they do have a limited life and are difficult to keep from contaminating the environment, including the precious water table.

The town of Santa Cruz in Guanacaste province is also seeking a solution to trucking its refuse to the nearby town of Filadelfia. They are planning to reopen their landfull on a limited basis, in two “compartments” they hope will provide a relief to the dent that truck fuel makes in their budgets, but the solution is nowhere as elegant as that provided by Sitca.