Yesterday I went to the supermarket to buy some small groceries (bread, tuna fish, etc), since I have a kitchen of sorts in my hotel room. On the way back through the narrow streets I saw a crowd gathered ahead of me on the crossing road, and I could see smoke and some flames. Since I'm always up for a good disaster, I walked up to the commotion and saw that there was a guy with a fire extinguisher fighting a fire that had broken out among the mess of phone (and God knows what else) cables that is common on all the streets here.
Unfortunately I didn't have my iPhone with me, so I could not take a picture of the festivities, but you can see a typical example of the type of wiring job they do here in the picture I have posted above. Since those are all low-voltage telephone cables, I'm not sure how they were able to catch fire, but I suppose it must be possible. The fire had actually broken out a several points along the mass of cables, and one little tendril had even made a left turn and was heading up the side street I was on. The guy with the fire extinguisher quickly ran out of juice, and I saw a few locals running up to the scene with a garden hose! For those of you who don't know, it's not usually a good idea to try to put out an electrical fire with water, but apparently these guys didn't know that either. I didn't stick around to see if these guys got electrocuted (probably not, since, again, these were low voltage wires; on the other hand, just above them were the high-voltage power cables!).
By the time I got back to the hotel I could hear a siren, so perhaps the fire department got there. More likely, it was just the wail of an ambulance that was caught in traffic.
This whole debacle sort of illustrates the problems facing countries like this one. The rat's nest phenomenon isn't restricted to Bangladesh, by the way; in fact, I have seen similar or even worse setups in Vietnam and Mongolia. But it does show that, while developing countries can be very good at rolling out infrastructure, they are very bad at maintaining it. So they will build these nice roads and avenues in the cities, and then watch as they get more and more potholed, fixing them only in extremis. If there's a problem with a cable, just run another one; don't bother to remove the bad one. And why replace all those cables with a single, higher-capacity one? After all, those telephone poles are strong, and they can hold lots and lots of single cables.
Of course, our own country has problems maintaining infrastructure (witness the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a few years ago), so I should not be pointing fingers. But it is instructive to see the cost in places that don't maintain their infrastructure in order to appreciate that we need to be keeping ours up to date.
 |
| Typical rat's nest of wiring |
By the time I got back to the hotel I could hear a siren, so perhaps the fire department got there. More likely, it was just the wail of an ambulance that was caught in traffic.
This whole debacle sort of illustrates the problems facing countries like this one. The rat's nest phenomenon isn't restricted to Bangladesh, by the way; in fact, I have seen similar or even worse setups in Vietnam and Mongolia. But it does show that, while developing countries can be very good at rolling out infrastructure, they are very bad at maintaining it. So they will build these nice roads and avenues in the cities, and then watch as they get more and more potholed, fixing them only in extremis. If there's a problem with a cable, just run another one; don't bother to remove the bad one. And why replace all those cables with a single, higher-capacity one? After all, those telephone poles are strong, and they can hold lots and lots of single cables.
Of course, our own country has problems maintaining infrastructure (witness the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a few years ago), so I should not be pointing fingers. But it is instructive to see the cost in places that don't maintain their infrastructure in order to appreciate that we need to be keeping ours up to date.
No comments:
Post a Comment