Mysterious BlackBlob
"They can offer me double the
fare, but if La Mancha Negra is bad I won't drive. It's not worth dying
for" said Orlando Acevedo, a taxi driver.
What in the black blob...?
in 1992CARACAS,
Venezuela - The driving is easy. The road is smooth. Suddenly the car spins and
swirls out of control as it skates along a layer of goo that mysteriously
covers highways here.
 |
| The Black Blob |
Venezuelans call
the goo La Mancha Negra - the black stain - but it's really more like a blob, a
thick black sludge with the consistency of chewing gum. No one knows what it
is. No one knows where it comes from. No one knows how to get rid of it.
Some say it's oil
oozing from poorly made asphalt. Others say it's oil falling from overworked
car engines. It could be burned rubber from frayed tires. Some people think
it's all of the above.
Motorists are
petrified of the blob. Government officials have spent millions of dollars
trying to find out what it is, using local experts and others from the U.S.,
Canada and Europe.
They've formed a
national commission to study the blob, and even a federal judge is
investigating.
"We don't
know what it is. We clean it away and it comes back the next day. It's
frightening," said Arturo Carvajal, an engineer and vice president of a
company trying to remove the goo from a major Caracas highway.
PRESSURIZED WATER:
Carvajal's
company and others have tried washing the blob away with pressurized water and
detergent. They've tried blowing it away with pressurized air.
They've tried
drying it up with piles of pulverized limestone. And they've scraped it away by
repeatedly replacing the top layer of
asphalt on some
blob-infested highways.
At various times,
the government has declared victory, only to have La Mancha Negra return bigger
and worse than ever. And it's reproducing, somehow moving from one highway to
the next throughout Venezuela.
The blob also is
a killer: More than 1,800 motorists have died in the past five years on one
eight-mile stretch of blob-covered highway between Caracas and the city's
international airport.
"Driving
with La Mancha Negra is like driving in a grand prix. You've got to be careful,
or you'll die," said Antonio Perez, a taxi driver who frequently deals
with the blob on the airport highway.
FIVE-YEAR MYSTERY:
It was on this
road five years ago that La Mancha Negra first appeared. The government was
patching the 30-year-old concrete highway with asphalt when the first shiny
blotches appeared. Few Venezuelans took notice. The blob was in its infancy.
At first the blob
covered 50 yards. Then 100 yards. Then a mile. And now eight miles, though the
blob contracts and expands depending on the weather. Rain and heat make the
substance grow; cold and dryness make it shrink. The blob also seems to like it
best in tunnels, and it prefers the uphill lanes on grades rather than level
roads.
In a nation where
corruption is endemic, many Venezuelans think someone made big money - and
unexpectedly created the blob - by laying cheap asphalt that bleeds oil when
the temperature rises. Others think someone is making big money by repeatedly
botching the repair job.
That's where the
judge comes in. He has been investigating charges of corruption since last
year, but no one has been fingered. Not the Ministry of Transportation and
Communications, which is responsible for taking care of the nation's highways.
Not the Venezuelan national oil company, which provided the asphalt.
"There could
be corruption, but who knows for sure? Everybody is giving a different
explanation. It's a total mystery," said Ruth Capriles, Venezuela's
foremost whistle-blower and author of the two-volume "Corruption Dictionary,"
a compendium of the nation's worst cases of graft.
Capriles, like
most Venezuelans, has pet theories about La Mancha Negra. She thinks political
opponents of President Carlos Andres Perez may be dumping oil on the roads to
make his government look bad. And then there is the theory that raw sewage from
slums somehow is flowing under the roads and triggering a chemical reaction in
the asphalt.
AS SLICK AS ICE:
Whatever the
source of La Mancha Negra, it makes driving hell. Motorists say roads become as
slick as ice when the blob is at full strength. Drivers slow to a snail's pace,
and they don't dare hit the brakes or turn quickly for fear of doing a 360 and
ending up in the trees.
On the airport
road, where multiple-car pile-ups are common, huge red signs warn motorists to
slow down and drive with caution. Four nights a week, the uphill side of the
road is closed while 50 workers wash, blow, scrape and pulverize the blob.
Workers say they
finally had the monster on the ropes in April, when they covered it with
crushed limestone. It shriveled and shrunk and all but disappeared. But when
motorists complained that dust made it difficult to breathe, the blob was given
a reprieve.
Now, workers are out
of answers. That makes Venezuelans tremble
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