In our third story of our series «De-constructing the Kifissos River», Alexander Schellow meets and engineer.
Where Kifissos meets the sea – a hot and abandoned place between a harbor on one side and decomposing ship-wrecks on the other side – sometimes it’s possible to see man fishing in the water. Even people canoeing appear from time to time. Walking along the last couple of hundred meters through stones and trash, the division of the stream right at the mouth of the river attracted my attention.
A: But very concretely I was wondering… – at the end of the river – where it goes into the sea divides into two tracks actually. Is there any technical reason why it is done like this. Like the last part, the last maybe 500 meters or a bit more, 1km, I don’t know…
Engineer: Yes, this was a mistake of… eh –
A: It was a mistake? That’s kind of funny. It is quite a huge mistake out of concrete…
Engineer: You mean the two –
A: – the two channels. Because in fact it looks quite dysfunctional.
Engineer: It is! And with this division, it makes it harder to avoid flooding, especially with heavy rains. You know the engineers for the highway thought that with this construction, their life would be easier and it was actually built before some of the hydraulic studies had reacted – but at the time the analyses had been done, this portion had already been built. These 500 meters. The initial study was planned for the beginning of the construction-period, but it didn’t end up happening until after.
A: So it means the builders were in so much of a hurry that they just built and didn’t wait to speak with the experts before proceeding? To decide this kind of… – wow, that makes sense.
Engineer: At least fortunately, it is only for this part…
The article series De-constructing the Kifissos was produced with and published by Meld.cc
