Technically a hiatus.

Happy New Year's wishes to all, though this blog ends the year on a bit of a sour note. My computer revived while in the States, but, now that I'm back in Afghanistan, it seems to have failed again--while another December blog post was in the process (among the only files that was not backed up). All my photos are also stored there, and while most are backed up as well, it is very difficult (and a bit risky) to manage external hard drives while working on shared computers over here.

Until I figure out what is wrong with this computer, or purchase a new one, I'm going to have to do the unthinkable and put this blog on hiatus. This could be only a matter of a few weeks, though it may also be a few months, since it's possible I'll be in Afghanistan that long and I don't want to bring a brand new computer into these living conditions. All is well otherwise, I wish you the best start to your 2012, and please stay tuned.

DUST: Bringing the basic training obstacle course inside the wire.

The integration of pedestrian infrastructure into the expeditionary base environment in Afghanistan has proven far less contentious than one might expect. A culture that prioritizes short-term efficiency over long-term functionality (at least partially evidenced by my article on building code violations from nearly a year ago) would seemingly scrutinize exclusively on infrastructure that accommodates gargantuan armored vehicles that need to get around with as few obstructions as possible in order to complete their respective missions. But the fact remains that only a small fraction of the people use MRAPs, Humvees or the all-too-rare tanks to get around. A slightly larger fraction use Toyota trucks, but because most people enter and leave a base through from the air, the number of vehicles on base isn’t nearly great enough to accommodate everyone. Most people get around by foot.

While the infrastructure might not be as conducive to pedestrians or bicyclists as your average neighborhood in Portland, it’s not as bad as many bases on back on American home turf, which are consistently spread out across huge tracts of land, with huge standoff distances between buildings intended as a protective measure in case of a vehicular explosive attack. Afghan bases are typically densely settled, or, at the very least, most planners recognize the efficiency of clustering residential tents and ensconcing them within ample protective barriers. And while grade separated sidewalks are not too common— particularly at the smaller bases that usually have the shortest life span—the regulatory and operational culture recognizes pedestrians. Speed limits for vehicles are incredibly low, often only 20 kph (12 mph), with fines for violators. Many units require their personnel to wear reflector belts at all hours, just to keep them prepared if the sun sets when they are out. (Most bases are fairly dark, and some are completely blacked out for safety, so pedestrian visibility is critical.) American soldiers must wear helmets if they ride bicycles. The larger bases often devote their sprawling outskirts to storage and industry, so they must employ a shuttle system with various mapped stops for ease of getting across those vast distances. And some of the largest bases, such as Bagram Air Field, close off primary arterials at certain early hours in the morning to all vehicles to devote the road for running and PT (physical training). In a multinational base, the American penchant for order and enforcement promotes a higher standard for pedestrian safety for its soldiers than is evidenced by the more relaxed coalition forces of other countries: coalition forces do not live under a mandate for reflector belts, nor does it seem that speed limits apply (at least for the Germans). This dichotomy between US and Europeans proves ironic, since the Germans, Swedes, Croats, and Latvians are more likely to come from a pedestrian friendly, densely populated settlement pattern back home than the Americans, yet the American rules are superior at promoting safety for the numerous troops and civilians depending on boots and bikes.

In contrast with the regulatory environment, the road design in expeditionary bases isn’t always great: sidewalks are inconsistent, rights of way are narrow, turn radii don’t accommodate the really long vehicles, drainage (if it exists at all) usually consists of wide-open ditches along the verge. But pedestrians and vehicles coexist reasonably well, thanks to those vehicular speed restrictions and a culture of awareness among drivers and walkers, particularly visible among the Americans in the multinational-base in which I reside. I have yet to hear of an accident, which is always a good thing, but particularly so on a military base, because a collision between a person and an armored vehicle would almost certainly result in death. However, force protection requirements sometimes trump other safety considerations, so that the design of a compound simply accounts for defensive barriers in the event of an external attack, rather than thinking about pedestrian safety and explosive defenses as a comprehensive protection strategy. As a result, it is not so hard to find situations such as the one below:

The wall on the left consists of what the military simply calls “HESCO”, much to the advantage of the UK-based HESCO Bastion company that manufactures them. HESCO enjoys a virtual monopoly on this distinctive fortification, known generically as a gabion (its brand name is a Concertainer), which essentially consists of tall (approximately 8 feet) durable paper bags enclosed in a thick wire mesh and filled with a combination of soil and a concrete topping, intended to absorb much of the impact of high speed missiles or mortars without eliciting dangerous projectiles if the bags themselves explode. The helices of concertina wire that coil on the top help keep out intruders.

Anyone who has read more than one or two of my blog posts can guess what I’m identifying as the problem in that photo above: there is simply not enough room on the side of the road for people to walk safely. The scaling of the objects does not quite capture the problem, but this footprint in the dirt does a better job of it:

It’s narrow. During the day, this proves a minor annoyance which a person can at least in part avoid by walking on the other side of the street. The real threat is after dark, when neither side of the road is terribly appealing, since the darkness would obscure the obvious tripping hazard found in the open drainage ditch, only a few portions of which are covered and protected.

And the typical base in Afghanistan is shrouded in absolute darkness with few isolated exceptions—a particularly salient problem during the long winter nights. I’ll admit that I tend to sound the warning bell in situations like this far sooner than the average person would. So this design deserves a special mention because multiple colleagues have also pointed out the safety hazard this poses. Why did the original squadron build the HESCO wall so close to the street? No compound is so crowded that the construction team couldn’t afford to shift the barriers at least a few feet inward to make room for walkers, or a drainage ditch for that matter. Turning the corner at the next intersection and pivoting to the left, one can see that on the next perpendicular street, the gabion of HESCOs offer plenty of room for both pedestrians and a drainage ditch.

The photo merely depicts a different wall to the same compound, this time with ample room for drainage and pedestrians. This road segment, far closer to achieving a US model of a Complete Street, also features intermittent wooden bridges across the drainage ditches, prominently visible in the photo above on the opposite side of the street. At night, these bridges feature blinking LEDs that both manifest the bridges to pedestrians as well as identify the edge of the road to passing vehicles, so the drivers avoid hitting and destroying the wooden bridges or slipping into the adjacent drainage ditches.

A bit further down the road, one can witness a rare installation underway: sidewalks.

Until this newly laid segment, sidewalks were unheard of in the American portion of the base. Most of the smaller bases with populations under 10,000 (which is practically all of them) have no sidewalks whatsoever. Sidewalks are intermittent in the German portion of the base, as visible in the photo below:

But they aren’t everywhere in the German portion. About 500 feet down the same road, the configuration of the Relocatable Buildings (RLBs) is identical, but the street lacks sidewalks, bollards, or drainage ditches.

The Germans can be just as cavalier about accommodating pedestrians as the Americans have been. I scrutinized the German street design in greater detail in this earlier blog post).

The contrasting appearance between the various road segments identified in these photographs delineates a dichotomous approach to expeditionary base construction: permanent versus temporary. As the photos above indicate, German billeting is overwhelmingly permanent: the modular buildings sit in lengthy rows of two, unified by a central hallway, like a conventional double-loaded corridor hotel building. Some of the central offices and meeting spaces even use brick and mortar construction. By most regards, these buildings function at a higher standard of quality and durability, predicating upon the assumption that, since the German military purchased the land, it will maintain a presence at this base for the foreseeable future. Hungarians and Croats also appear to prefer the permanence of relocatable buildings. Conversely, at this same base, Americans use tents:

So do the Norwegians.

As do the Swedes, Finns, Latvians, Armenians, and Dutch. While I can’t vouch for the other Coalition Forces, I knew that the American mentality is that everything they construct should be capable of disassembly in 48 hours if necessary, leaving as little of a permanent footprint as possible.

I wouldn’t begin to assert that one approach is better than another—I’m not sufficiently informed on the long-term plans of Germans, Croats, Swedes, or even Americans for that matter. Permanent and temporary construction practices both have their merits. The average German base will, based on its construction materials, transition much more conveniently to eventual use by the Afghan National Army. The American bases won’t transition so easily, but if the priority is to get out and return to the land to the Afghans in a more fallow state, then clearly the non-permanent approach is wiser. My only concern comes in all the impervious surfaces used throughout the base—a topic which effectively concludes this rumination on pedestrian infrastructure.

It seems like a smart decision for the Americans to build a sidewalk along a stretch of road that hosts the American PX (Post Exchange, the closest thing to a big box store), a coffee shop, a Pizza Hut, a future Burger King, and, on the other side of the road, a USO Tent, post office, gym, finance office, chapel, and computer lab. It is undeniably the road segment in the American quarter with the highest amount of pedestrian traffic. But a concrete sidewalk is permanent. So are the drainage culverts, the basketball courts, and the foundations to all those tents. In short, the vertical element is what constitutes “temporary” in American expeditionary base construction: when we leave Afghanistan, it will look empty when standing on the ground staring at the horizon line, but peering downward from a helicopter will reveal a patchwork of pavement. How likely is it that the Americans, Swedes, Norwegians, et cetera will actually remove or destroy all that concrete—or, for that matter, the far vaster ocean of gravel that occupies most other unpaved, habitable portions of the base? Then again, even concrete pads and paved streets can prove a significant investment that would allow Afghans more freedom to build upward from an existing configuration. Concrete pads for temporary FEMA trailers in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina helped pave the way for the possibility of more permanent mobile home parks after the immediate need had subsided. Paved roads, drainage ditches, and sidewalks are amenities that much of Afghanistan does not enjoy, so although paved infrastructure forces future inhabitants into a certain configuration, it does provide provincial governments with infrastructure that they otherwise cannot always afford. A middle-of-the-road approach—combining permanent infrastructure with semi- or non-permanent structures—may prove the wisest compromise. Though I doubt that engineers at my compound will ever correct the mistake of building the HESCO gabion too close to the road and squeezing out the pedestrians, at least the potentiality for a correction remains in ways that wouldn’t if a permanent brick wall ran along the road instead of soil-filled bags. Like all other aspects of expeditionary base living, pedestrianism is malleable—precisely as it should be when tomorrow’s exigencies could require an immediate change in the urban form.

Taking the sewer less traveled.

It probably doesn't seem like the most savory topic, and it's already my second blog post to reference the porcelain god. But wastewater removal is such a fundamental infrastructural component to sustaining dense developments that it is impossible to ignore or make light of it. For nascent settlements in resource-poor parts of the globe, it could just as easily be the critical prophylaxis against a cholera epidemic. As an instructor of mine once said from a class on housing in developing countries (in her thick Germanic accent): “It all comes down to where de shit flows.” Middle and upper income communities usually have sophisticated enough infrastructure that diverting the sewage away from housing is not a great concern; that process is already fully in place. Instead, wealthier countries can maximize the efficiency at which they convey effluent for treatment and dispersal. For this reason, I should not have been as surprised as I was when I first encountered this toilet at a latrine in central Afghanistan, taken (along with the three subsequent ones) by Beau Sheffer.

Nothing special, of course, though certainly spiffier looking than the rest of the latrine.

For those who have no basis of comparison—which, I suppose, is the majority of the civilian world—this latrine is pretty standard looking, in that it's somewhat tired and battle scarred (presumably only figuratively). My suspicion is that it is at least a decade old, with the predictable accumulation of graffiti over that duration of time. The frame of this modular sink/toilet unit has seen better days, but the toilets themselves are brand new.

The writing is too small to see, but tucked in the back of the seat is the brand name: American Standard. Timeless, renowned for its craftsmanship, and ubiquitous in both private residences and commercial restrooms across the nation. A truly classic toilet. It may have long ago surpassed its resilient top competitors, Kohler, Eljer, and my personal favorite, Bemis. But the operation of this latrine hardly complies with run-of-the-mill American Standard toilets. The clue should be the flush lever. Why is it green?

The symbol to the left of the green lever should provide a clue, but if it doesn’t, a sign on the wall above the toilet and shoulder-height explains more thoroughly.

These are dual-flush toilets, in which a push of the lever in a certain direction controls the amount of water flow used to flush the waste down. It appears the dual-flush apparatus comes courtesy of Sloan Valve, a company specializing in water-saving plumbing technology. As the diagram illustrates, an upward push of the lever releases a standard amount of water of 1.6 gallons per flush for solid waste, while a downward push initiates considerably lower flow, at less than 1.0 gpf, since far less is usually necessary for liquid waste. The intention through this innovation in toilets is to manage the minimum water level necessary to get everything down, thereby saving water for instances when the high consumption levels aren't necessary to elicit a good flush. Over the long-term, water consumption—and the ensuing utility bills—should be noticeably lower.

Dual-flush toilets have become particularly popular in parts of the world that struggle with continued water scarcity. Not surprisingly, Australia first introduced the technology over 30 years ago and has adapted to it more readily than just about anywhere else. Aside from the amount of water employed in a flush, the other large distinction between dual-flush toilets and conventional ones is the siphoning process. When a large volume of water enters the toilet bowl and overflows the exit pipe, it essentially creates a vacuum, which pulls the effluent down during the flush until air enters the process, thereby arresting the siphoning. (A likely more eloquently worded description of the process can be found here.) While standard toilets use this siphoning action, dual-flush toilets employ a larger trapway (the hole at the bottom of the bowl) and a wash-down flushing design that pushes waste down the drain. No siphoning action is involved, and the larger diameter trapway makes it easy for waste to exit the bowl without depending on such a large volume of water. (Discover Company provides a more detailed description.) Conventional toilets until recently have used as much as 5 gallons of water per flush—an incredible waste in any climate, but particularly profligate in a dry one, such as Australia or Afghanistan.

This plumbing innovation has not caught on in the United States until quite recently, so it was quite a surprise for me to find it in an austere military milieu, especially considering that the approach to potable drinking water across ISAF (International Security and Assistance Force) is through individually portioned plastic bottles, which scarcely ever get recycled—and only if the receptacles labeled “recyclables” actually live up to their claim. In short, Operation Enduring Freedom is not seeking ecologically sound solutions to drinking water provision. However, the US military has been far more conservative in its use of all other forms of water—for bathing, cooking, and flushing of toilets, so resource conservation is not entirely foreign. All personnel are encouraged in most instances to take “combat showers”—3 minutes or less—to deal with the finite supply of treated, unpurified water that comes out of the taps in latrines. And it appears that the newer toilets are increasingly adopting dual flush technology to conserve more water. Even if the primary source of drinking water depends heavily on non-biodegradable containers, at least the infrastructure for non-potable water emphasizes a certain moderation.

I have now seen dual-flush toilets more in Afghanistan than I have in the United States, where my only encounter has been in an academic institution—and just one building out of many within this institution. I'm confident there are certain settings in the US where they are widespread, and their prominence is only likely to grow as they assert themselves as a sine qua non within any green building initiative. The US Green Building Council has long included Water Efficiency as one of its fundamental categories for achieving LEED Certified status within New Construction and Major Renovations. The embedded prerequisite of Water Use Reduction mandates that structures will “employ strategies that in aggregate use 20% less water than the baseline calculated for the building”, which, according to the USGBC's standards, is 1.6 gpf for commercial toilets and 1.0 gpf for urinals—exactly on par with the target volumes in dual-flush toilets. Beyond this fundamental requirement, a developer/project manager can earn additional points within the Water Efficiency category through two more credit topics. The first applicable topic is WE-2, Innovative Wastewater Technologies, which recommends that potable water use for building sewage conveyance must be reduced 50% through high-efficiency or even dry fixtures (waterless urinals, composting toilet systems), as a means of earning these additional credits. The second topic is WE-3, Water Use Reduction, which more or less takes the standards from the original Water Efficiency prerequisite and awards additional credits if water consumption can be reduced even further from the baseline, from 30% up to 50%, again through toilets, urinals, faucets, showers, or spray valves. Achieving the 10 Water Efficiency points may be enough to distinguish a LEED Gold-rated building from a LEED Silver. Clearly toilets contribute enough to overall water efficiency to feature heavily in any dialogue on green engineering and construction.

While the USGBC has probably achieved more in elevating the status of dual-flush toilets in the United States, they remain at this point a relative obscurity, limited primarily to commercial construction from the past decade or so. Most Americans have no idea how they work or that such devices exist. While they obviously enjoy a higher profile in Australia or countries with a robust heritage of energy efficient construction (Germany always first comes to mind), some of my recent travels suggest it may have also caught on in the fast-developing world.

This toilet from a higher-end Italian restaurant in the Jumeirah Beach Resort district in Dubai, UAE may appear exactly as one would expect in such a milieu. Typical of toilets in this part of the world, it uses a button to operate the flush, contrary to the lever most commonly employed in the US. And judging from the design of the button, it's a dual flush:

Obviously the smaller button on the right corresponds to the lesser water flow.

A public restroom in Turkey employs a similar strategy for communicating the dual-flush technology. My apologies for the poor photo quality, but it should still be obvious that the smaller button on the right is intended to flush liquid waste.

Turkey is home to what is largely believed to be the oldest flush toilet system in the world, in the ancient Byzantine city of Ephesus, seen below.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Turks boast the latest in resource conserving plumbing infrastructure. Business owners throughout Turkey have in recent years engaged in a campaign to “modernize” restrooms away from the “squat” Turkish toilet, usually perceived as a cathole-in-the-ground and much maligned by Western visitors, despite its comparative simplicity, efficiency, and potentially superior sanitation. The interesting distinction about this toilet is that the structure that houses it is anything but new: it is the Pera Palace Hotel in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, the definition of luxury for over 110 years, and allegedly where Agatha Christie devised one of her most celebrated mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express. An extensive renovation completed in 2010 most likely resulted in sleek new water-conserving toilets.

One remaining concern, however, distinguishes the American example in Afghanistan from the other countries and which the water conservation efficacy of these two dual flush toilets hinges upon: without an instructional sign, would the average user know how it works? I am not in a position to determine whether such toilets are commonplace in either of these two countries. I didn’t see too many other examples during these recent travels, though if I were to guess, I suspect dual-flush technology is far more common in the United Arab Emirates than in Turkey. Even if they are a sufficiently common occurrence that Turks and Emiratis know which button to push, it’s hard to imagine that too many foreign visitors would know how to react when confronted with both a small and large button, either in Dubai—where, on average, 80-90% of the population consists of expatriates, or this particular hotel in Istanbul, which targets moneyed foreign tourists, often from elsewhere in Europe or North America. And if these visitors use the buttons incorrectly out of ignorance, it would easily nullify any of the potential for resource conservation.

Thus, the real effectiveness of this campaign may boil down to semiotics. Just about any populist environmental initiative requires an outreach campaign to get people on board—the lack of basic communication would guarantee that even those with a genuine interest in conservation will remain in the dark. Dual-flush technology may currently be a pioneering effort in the US, the brains behind the toilet latrines in Afghanistan seem far better at gauging their potential user than the more elegant but less informative versions in UAE and Turkey. For the record, the one dual-flush toilet example I saw in the US also had an explanatory label.

Chances are strong that this blog post, which regards these dual-flushers as an obscure novelty, will seem quaint within five to ten years. Before long, water-efficient toilets will undoubtedly become widespread enough that Americans no longer depend on the signage to tell them how it works, which is already apparently the current condition in much of Australia (and most likely other countries as well). One day, the two buttons above the toilet—or the green up-down lever—will seem as natural and self-explanatory as the blue recycle bins with the Mobius Loop. However, we can never optimize resource conservation—it is a perpetual teleological process, raising the bar steadily over time. One can only anticipate that American Standard, or Bemis, or Sloan will devise a new machine in a few years to resolve the latest perceived inefficiency, and eventually that new device will supplant the dual-flush toilet, which will at that time seem archaic. Hopefully these innovators will be as savvy toward outreach and self-promotion as they are at engineering.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part II – Just add water.

In the first half of this post, I explored my limited familiarity of Afghanistan’s pedology—the physical characteristics of the soil that allow scientists to place regions into different taxonomies, governed at least in part by a variety of temperature and moisture regimes. Without using any more terms that strain my word processor’s spell check feature, I’ll focus this time on those physical properties from a more empirical angle. I have scores of pictures to show the vast array of characteristics that force us—at least here in Afghanistan—to be conscious always of the conditions of the ground we walk on. The analogies for Afghan soil are limitless: the oft-cited moon dust, talcum powder, Pixie Stix, cosmetics, beige cocaine, cement mix. Aside from the generally agreed-upon observation that the ground is quite soft to the touch whenever it’s dry, none of the descriptions are flattering. The mere tire tracks from a vehicle manifest the torripsamments with dunes condition; the treads of a tire don’t imprint themselves into Afghan soil; they just displace the powder together into little rounded piles. If people were to get their faces close to the ground and exhale heavily, those “dunes” would disperse.

As annoying as it may be to fend against the steady accumulation of dust/dirt particles indoors, at least it is generally harmless to wooden or plastic furniture. It poses a much more serious problem to the electronics needed for basic operations here.

I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in cleaning my computer top, partly to make a point, so the environment in that photo above is a bit contrived. But imagine how long it would take to achieve this level of dust accumulation in most environments in the US. Here’s a co-worker’s desk:

And here is a more authentic depiction of dust patterns on a laptop that I use—one that I have cleaned with pressurized air about two weeks ago.

Compare the keys that are commonly used (most letters) with those that generally remain untouched (the function keys at the top row, or the letter Z) to see what even a couple days of accumulation can achieve. It has undeniably caused the demise of some expensive machinery, and I have no doubt that particles of soil effectively killed the camera I referenced in a recent post.

And yet these wearying images and descriptions are only indicative of the soil conditions in Afghanistan during the dry climate. When the soil is wet, which is often the case during the rainy season (running from late January to mid April), it offers an entirely different array of unpleasant burdens.

In early April, we received an early morning sprinkle over the course of maybe two or three hours, though never enough to justify an umbrella by most people’s standards. The photo above and several below demonstrate the aftermath. Sure, they're just puddles, but puddles wouldn’t typically form after a sprinkle, even accounting for the relative imperviousness of the gravel base. The conditions are far worse in other locations.

For the most part, the soil here does not support anything more than scrappy, intermittent herbs and grasses, which is the yin to this abiotic yang. If the earth grew more plants, their root systems would facilitate drainage, but since the soil’s percolation ability is poor—characteristic, no doubt, of the Psamment suborder mentioned earlier—most plants simply can’t grow. These helicopter views are poor quality, for which I apologize, but it still manifests the conditions in Afghanistan after a minor shower, which is generally all we get here:

It looks like a mud slide engulfed the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but this just shows the typical conditions after rain—an endless sheet of beige slime, punctuated by occasional grasses (but only during the spring growing season). Viewed from the ground, the ponding is much worse in one of the lower points of Bear Village, the American Army compound at Camp Marmal:

The poor folks who live in these tents have to deal with days of standing water; it only diminishes through evaporation, and in the peak of the rainy season (which this year was February) minor sprinkles occur every few days. Although the rocks would seem to impede drainage, the gravel bed is the only preventative measure to keep pedestrians from slurping through ankle-deep mud. Witness these slippery stairs nearby:

And the conditions on the less heavily graveled side of that wall:

Puddles emerge after even the mildest of rains—and virtually all rains in Afghanistan are insignificant, yet they are hardly ever inconsequential: the mildest ones still take at least a full day to evaporate, remarkable given the arid nature of the climate through much of the year. Drainage simply does not occur to any measurable degree. Thus, the German engineers who first broke ground at Camp Marmal several years ago decided to build a full array of drainage ditches, partially visible in this earlier blog post, to prepare for no more than a half-dozen modest drizzles over a four-month rainy season in the late winter and early spring. The rest of the time, those ditches will sit idle.

Thus, the engineers and planners for this base had to invest in a drainage system to prepare for a situation that usually occurs no more than a half dozen times each year. And many years the rainy season passes by without a real thunderstorm. It seemed like 2011 was going to be one of those years, but around the 10^th of April, just days before the anticipated end of all measurable rain, Balkh province in Afghanistan got pummeled. Well, not really: the storm was no more than a half hour of moderate rain; not enough to make people in Louisiana open their umbrellas. But it was significant enough for this arid country. The immediate aftermath of a shower at this scale is predictable, given the conditions of the soil:

Ponding is especially problematic in the back of these tents, where the HVAC systems and circuit breakers rest. Fortunately it didn’t appear too bad this time:

But it was more than enough to fill those roadside drainage ditches:

And elsewhere, the water just sat in pools atop the nearly impermeable mud.

It turned out this was just the prelude to our apocalypse. About an hour later, as the sky was fully brightening, we encountered this unpleasantness:

Water had come surging down the mountainside, accumulating velocity and volume as gravity took its course, so that the landlocked tsunami forced its way through the opening formed by the base’s Commercial Entry Control Point (ECP), continuing on down what used to be a road—a paved one, mind you:

At the next major intersection, the low point formed by two streets allowed the water to disperse…

…right into our compound.

Sandbags worked as valiantly as possible, but they were no match for these water levels, some of which easily topped a foot in height. The sandbags on the closest side of this tent were completely submerged.

Here is the front of our row of tents, after the flood had peaked and begun to recede:

And the back, where it mercifully appears that the Environmental Control Units (ECUs) weren’t badly affected:

While our one-acre compound bore the brunt of the flooding because of our proximity to the Commercial ECP, other parts of the base felt the impact as well. The large drainage swale, empty 96% of the year, came close to topping over.

Fortunately the engineering for this swale is superior to that of these smaller channels, which exceeded their capacity, resulting in some minor water intrusion in the back portion of the American gym:

Though the channel below looks unremarkable as a static image, the water had crested above its banks just 30 minutes earlier, and the flow speed at the time of this photo was still so fast that a person falling in would likely result in a drowning.

And, of course, combining all that water with the infuriating Afghan soil results in one ubiquitous condition: ankle-deep mud. The photos below show the conditions the next day, approximately twenty-four hours after the rainshower:

And inside the tents, which, at the time of this photo, were in the process of being dismantled:

It’s hard to capture depth or thickness of such a large planar surface with a camera, but let it be known that if one’s boots were not tied tightly enough, the suction of that thick stew would easily pull them off. After wading through it for just a few minutes, a person would come out two inches taller, with newly formed platform shoes.

It took three twelve-hour days to restore most of our compound, which truthfully was probably not a long time considering the vast amount of work to be done. It could have been much worse: no tent received more than 16 inches of water and, most importantly, no one was hurt. But it remains a curiosity to most Americans that it happened at all. The rain volume, even for a largely arid environment, were not particularly severe, and yet it elicited flash flood conditions at the base. My suspicion is that the intensity of the rain was much greater in the nearby Hindu Kush mountains, which would help to explain the deceptively large surge that came barreling down the slope and hour later. The change in grade also undoubtedly intensified the velocity at which the water tumbled down. But the soil remains the key player; its imperviousness contributed to both the volume and the speed of the run-off. By no means does Camp Marmal have the greatest drainage infrastructure: as mentioned in a previous blog on cost-cutting measures at military outposts, it's hard to justify the steep expenditures for a top-of-the-line flood prevention system at a base which its creators never intended to be permanent. Nonetheless, one can only imagine what the permanent Afghan population has to contend with during the rainy season: according to a report on the province of Balkh released by the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, only 49% of the province's households have electricity, 31% have access to safe drinking water, and only 12% can access safe toilet facilities. Incidentally, Balkh's standard of living ranks much higher than most other provinces in the country, thanks to the presence of a large city such as Mazar-e-Sharif. Within the urbanized areas in and around this nation's fourth-largest city, the above statistics are superior: 95% of households have electricity, 67% have safe drinking water, and 15% have safe toilets. However, like most of Afghanistan, Balkh is significantly rural, and remote settlements lacking good infrastructure are abundant. If systems for providing water are scarce or poor quality, it is reasonable to suspect that water removal and drainage are also less than advanced. We've experienced what happens on base during a minor rainstorm. How do the Afghans manage?

The soil in Afghanistan is a palpable impediment to the nation's citizens' ability to attain a higher standard of living. Those who live in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif still sometimes maintain garden plots outside the urbanized areas; the aforementioned report reveals that 40% of households in Balkh province depend on agriculture as the primary source of income, either through direct cultivation or trade. The parched climate and friable soil results in a remarkably short growing season for most grasses, suitable for the nomadic ethnic Pashtuns known has Kuchis, but undeniably a challenge for more permanently settled populations. Though the cultivation and consolidation of food no longer precludes urbanization in most developed nations, it most likely plays a role in Afghanistan's ranking as one of the world's most rural countries, with only 23% of the population living in urbanized areas. The dust impedes operationality of electronics, making it an unlikely place to attract foreign technological investment, a barrier further exacerbated by the incredibly low literacy rate (less than 30%, and barely 10% for women). The filmy layer of soil makes routine living for outsiders unacquainted with these levels of dust—which includes practically everyone—a constant frustration. It's miserable in the dry season and impedes visibility enough to pose potential problems for air travel, while eclipsing those mountain views much of the time. A person is never far from a spectacular mountain range, but he or she can often only see it half the year, as indicated by the visibility rates in the chart below:

My experience of southern Afghanistan around Kandahar was that it was even worse than Mazar-e-Sharif. Down there, everyone I spoke to felt as though the hands need washing every five minutes. And, of course, the rains, as rare as they are, not only elicit pools of muddy water in the best of times and catastrophic flooding at the worst, they render many of the roadways impassable—a tremendous problem in a region where only 38% of the roads can handle car traffic in all seasons. A mud-filled unpaved road is unusable.

Is there a region in North America at all comparable to Afghanistan? A superficial research of climatological patterns—an admitted problem when I understand northern Afghanistan's climate far better than my native country—suggests to me some parts of the US might share at least remotely similar pedological characterstics. The temperature and rainfall data for Mazar-e-Sharif in the charts below, as well as the previous visibility chart, comes from the Joint Meteorological and Oceanographic Climatology Segment from the Department of Defense. (I wish I had included this material in Part I of this essay, when I referenced temperature and moisture regimes, but at least I've managed to integrate it to Part II before it goes to post.)

In the US, from the information I could determine, the region that most closely mimics Afghanistan's alternating mountain/desert plateau topography falls, not surprisingly, in the West. But much of the Rockies receive far more precipitation, or the temperatures are far more consistently warm or cool than the extremes that Afghanistan experiences. The best that I could determine is that northern and central Nevada—a virtually waterless region that includes only a half-dozen counties (Humboldt, Churchill, Pershing, Lander, Elko, Eureka, White Pine) but covers a significant land mass (about half of the state)—may have soil that most closely resembles that of Afghanistan, in terms of the moisture and temperature regimes. However, north-central Nevada does not exactly meet the war-torn southwest Asian country's demographics.

While Afghanistan has a land area comparable to and a population somewhat larger than the state of Texas, northern Nevada (approximately 55,000) is virtually uninhabited. The largest communities in this region, are Elko, Fallon, and Winnemucca, which only total approximately 30,000 people. The famed U.S. Route 50-- “the Loneliest Road in America”--bisects the region. If it were to quintuple in size, which is about what it would take to be comparable to Afghanistan, it would still have fewer than a half million people. Afghanistan, by contrast, has a landscape more austere and certainly just as rural, but it claims a population of nearly 30 million. Obviously the distinguishing factors between northern Nevada and Afghanistan—which include birth rates, colonization histories, stability of governments, sovereignty and enforceable boundaries, among other things—are complicated enough to generate an entirely different article. Suffice it to say, though, that population distribution in the US has proven that, given the choice, a significant portion of America has not found northern Nevada suitable or desirable for settlement, where as Afghanistan's similarly unforgiving landscape hosts more people than any US state but California.

The soil conditions in this war-torn, remote—yet hardly unpopulated—country are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of impediments to long-term prosperity. By many metrics, Afghanistan enjoyed a higher standard of living under monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s than it does today. The Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s fostered an additional soil condition that prove a bigger onus to Afghan quality of life than any dust piles or flash floods: the land mines buried within. The statistics for the country are grim. According to the 2010 Landmine Monitor, Afghanistan had the highest number of casualties in the world, at 859—over 20% of the world's total. It is one of the five most mine-enriched countries, with an estimated 10 million total, so that every square mile of the country averages 40. The popular site Listverse estimates that mines kill or maim an estimated 10 to 12 people every day in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the country also benefits from some of the most intensive mine clearance initiatives in the world: Landmine Monitor reports that it ranked top globally in 2009 and the square kilometers of mine area cleared there comprise nearly 30% of the global total. Nonetheless, land mines will inevitably impede any other form of investment, until they are eradicated, which could easily take decades—while assuming that no other events will throw the demining process off course, or, inshallah, foster a new reason for planting land mines. This article may depict the living conditions in Afghanistan as bleak, thanks to its infuriating soil. However, the relics of war—and land mines are hardly a relic since they perpetuate a culture of conflict-related casualties long after a treaty has been signed—transcend most if not all of the intrinsic pedalogic features. Who knows—after the nation is liberated from its broadly scattered landmine catastrophe, maybe that moon dust will seem like small potatoes.