There had been a recent hurricane. For why, I don’t know but these always seem to happen at night in Venezuela. I’ve slept through a few. Often the only sign the next morning is the road signs are all flattened. Here is the wreckage of the parabolic disks. I took a ride out there to look by taxi, it was a good sixty miles from town. Twice as far as I’d remembered it on the bus ride in.
The tower itself was built to withstand the hurricane, with one possibility overlooked. The result was this calamity. All the strength was built into crosswinds. Apparently what happened is the tower was pulled straight upwards, causing the weakest joints to snap. Talk was the loss was a million dollars.
Gilbert was along, I was telling you his story. He’d eked out a living as a tour guide. Years later, on another trip, he mentioned he had a brother in Arizona or something. But his trip, he was still trying to get together enough to buy a building brick per day and build his own house. He was ancient but I never did find out his true age. Or if I did, I don’t remember.
We walked all around this site looking for clues. No luck. It was only much later we heard the theory that the town had been yanked upwards.
