The neighborhoods of Hollywood in the district of Nosara (canton of Nicoya), and El Bambú in Filadelfia (canton of Carrillo) have many things in common. The majority of the people who live in these neighborhoods were in shelters, where they sought refuge from the recent rains, and several of the families lost everything, or almost everything, due to water overflowing from the Nosara and Las Palmas rivers, which border their neighborhoods.
But there is something else that identifies them: both are informal settlements, where stories of floods that have left them on the verge of death repeat over and over again, without them being able to even imagine another possible story, although on paper, institutions have promised them a solution.
The current swept Iván Brenes and four of his neighbors down one of the streets of El Bambú neighborhood, in the district of Filadelfia, in the canton of Carrillo. “Clinging onto tree branches like monkeys, we struggled to swim between the houses, using the walls to kill the force of the current,” he says.
Iván squints his eyes to try to recall all the times when they’ve been flooded by the Las Palmas River, next to the neighborhood. Although this story could very well be recent, he’s actually remembering the occasion when he was on the verge of death. “It was the flood of 2017 when I almost drowned.”
In El Bambú, time is measured by the ravages of floods. That’s why Iván doesn’t specify the years or the names of the storms that have hit them, but he clearly remembers the events. In one flood, his father spent three days on the roof of his house, waiting to be rescued. On another occasion, the flood swept away his brother’s house. On two occasions, his brothers saved their mother, Berta Brenes, from drowning in front of her house; and he also remembers clearly that when he was a child, he spent nights in a shelter.
Iván remembers the floods he has survived while he sorts through the debris left in his mother’s house by tropical depression number 19, which became Tropical Storm Sara on Thursday, November 14.
The atmospheric phenomenon caused days of nonstop downpours in Costa Rica, and it hit Guanacaste the hardest. On the coast between Liberia and the Peninsula of Nicoya, the National Meteorological Institute (Spanish acronym: IMN) recorded up to 1,200 millimeters (47.2 inches) of rain in just 14 days of the month, which is 83% of all the rain that normally falls in the province in a year (1,500 mm, or about 59.1 inches, on average).
On November 15, 2,332 people from the province were sheltered in 30 facilities. In the rest of the country, there were 18 more shelters.
Ivan Brenes is used to his family losing everything due to flooding. Since he was a child, every time it rains hard, his family has to be moved to shelters.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
El Bambú neighborhood, in Filadelfia of Carrillo, water from almost three weeks of rain lingers in stagnant puddles. The water isn’t just in the paths that function as streets. It also seeped into the homes and into the belongings that endured the flood.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
“It’s hard because maybe you struggle for several years to have the house nice again and wham, another flood,” says Iván while holding up one of the metal panels that was part of the wall of the room where he lived until he turned 23 and moved to Bagaces. Then he began to visit El Bambú to see Berta or to help her when the river floods.
Before the recent storm, his mom, who lives with a 35-year-old daughter, rented the room to Nicaraguan migrants who work in the sugar cane fields. The storm took practically the entire room. “All of this has to be built again,” says Ivan.
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El Bambú is located in Filadelfia, the central district of Carrillo. It’s a neighborhood that has three sectors, and one of them, “El Bambú II,” is an informal, or squatters, settlement in which 1,712 people lived, according to the 2011 Census records (the most recent data available).
Informal settlements aren’t necessarily a group of homes in terrible conditions – although that is a fairly common characteristic – but rather they are characterized by the fact that their inhabitants don’t have rights to the land or the houses, and they are in places where they should not be, such as protected areas. That’s why they are very vulnerable to climate events. Since 2012, for example, more than half of these settlements in Guanacaste (20 of 37) were at risk of flooding, according to an analysis by the Ministry of Housing and Human Settlements (Spanish acronym: MIVAH) using settlement data from the 2011 census.
Living in informal settlements is a reality for 1 in 10 people in the province, according to the latest Housing Balance and Trends from 2023. In the province, MIVAH has identified 62 informal settlements (25 more settlements since the 2011 census data).
In the case of El Bambú, the community is exposed to flooding for two main reasons: how close it is to the Las Palmas River and its location on “a piece of land that was not suitable for building houses,” according to an academic study.
According to one of its authors, hydrogeological engineer Fernando Matamoros Montoya, the big problem is that El Bambú is located on what was once a wetland, as reported to him and his research partner by neighborhood residents and the Municipality of Carrillo.
“A wetland is a natural barrier that mitigates the force of the river current, and by eliminating this natural barrier and building in these areas, people will be exposed to the repercussions of flooding no matter what,” explained Matamoros.
Both initially proposed early warning to reduce the impact of flooding on the community. And although the system helps them predict when to evacuate their homes in the face of an increase in the water level, they’re inevitably always on the verge of losing everything.
What they were able to determine is that if between 80 and 100 millimeters (3.15 to 3.94 inches) of rain falls in 24 hours, the community is already exposed to a yellow alert that requires them to evacuate. Above 100 millimeters, it’s then a red alert. And the community reached precisely that point, since Carrillo registered record rainfall with up to 302 mm (11.9 inches) in a single day.
Around 500 people were transferred to the eight shelters set up in Carrillo, specified Alicia Herrera, from the canton’s Cantonal Emergency Committee.
By Wednesday, November 20, Berta Brenes had been in one of the eight shelters in El Bambú in the canton of Carrillo for 15 days. During those days, some thieves stole from her house, which forced her to buy a new lock to replace the one they forced open.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
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About 90 kilometers (about 56 miles) from El Bambú, the Hollywood neighborhood, in the district of Nosara in Nicoya, is another informal settlement. It consists of a path in poor condition less than a kilometer long (about half a mile) that ends when it hits the Nosara River. To enter the neighborhood, you have to cross a ravine that looks harmless in the dry season, but in the rainy season, it’s the first to overflow and join the river, flooding all the houses in its path.
Most of the houses in the neighborhood are made of gypsum board (drywall), wood and metal panels. Some are on wooden stilts to prevent water from entering their houses, but not even that height ensures that they remain safe.
From the street, the houses look like labyrinths of rooms that are hard to decipher. Hidden behind these weak walls and improvised doors, there are rooms that are usually rented by Nicaraguan families who work in luxury buildings in areas of Nosara that don’t flood.
Adolfo Quesada Román, a geographer and a professor at the University of Costa Rica who has studied risks and disasters in informal settlements, mainly in the Greater Metropolitan Area, pointed out that people in informal settlements are more exposed, not because of the amount of rain, but because “more and more people live near the rivers.”
Why do they live there and why do they live in overcrowded conditions? With his years of studying risk and settlements, Quesada is sure about the reason:
“The economy, money, capital, is what drives where cities grow. If I have cities that are growing more towards certain parts, the population also grows in that area… Then many people, due to a matter of financial income, are pushed to live in dangerous areas because they don’t have the capacity to buy a property in a safe area. It’s sad, it’s sad, but it’s a reality,” he explained.
The Nosara River, next to the Hollywood neighborhood, has been studied due to showing changes in its course, due to processes of change of use, due to the growth of urban areas and due to representing a threat of flooding.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
What the families do, then, is face this reality, whatever it takes. Every night during the rainy season, María Villareal, who lives near the entrance to the neighborhood, checks WhatsApp groups in which neighbors warn about the level of the Nosara River. When it rains heavily, María doesn’t trust the reports and goes to the river to make sure with her own eyes.
She doesn’t follow this routine only as a preventive measure, but also so that the children in her house learn to identify a flood. “I take them so they can see what the river is like, so they’re learning,” said María amidst the mud and stones that the river dragged to her house.
She is convinced that she has to transmit this knowledge because they have no other choice, although the National Emergency Commission (CNE) devised a strategy back in 2015 that seeks to alleviate the impacts of weather events in informal settlements, among other objectives.
One of María’s sons refused to go to the shelter in order to take care of his dog, which had just given birth.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
As one of its actions, the 2016-2030 National Risk Management Policy advocates that the institutions related to housing development and territorial planning, including municipalities, “need to identify human settlements located in threat sites, promote the reduction of risk factors and the relocation of vulnerable populations.”
But after almost a decade after creating the guidelines, families impacted by floods perceive that nothing changes every time their belongings get water damage.
Quesada considers relocations to be extremely difficult measures due to the costs that would be involved for the government. What he believes in is adaptation.
“[We should focus on] how we adapt to changing conditions [due to the climate crisis],” explained the geographer, adding that the country also needs a law – currently non-existent – on zoning and public policies (including regulatory plans) that are issued from local governments.
In 2019, the water reached the second floor of María’s house. The firefighters that came by boat had to remove the wooden planks from the balcony to get her and her family out.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
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During the recent emergency, Hollywood flooded three times. On average, 110 people a day were taken care of at the Nosara bull riding ring, which served as a shelter from November 5 until Saturday, the 16th, according to numbers from the Nosara Community Emergency Committee. Most of the people were Nicaraguans living in the neighborhood.
During the floods, the Nosara Firefighters carried out some 470 rescues in the district. When an emergency looms, rescue units start in Hollywood because it’s one of the areas most affected during floods, according to Chief Ryan Bombard.
The boat and inflatables navigate between the groups of illegal houses to take affected people to the bull riding ring. Erick Castro, one of the firefighters, believes that overcrowding, poor building conditions and proximity to the river are the main risks faced by the neighborhood and the rescue workers.
“In Hollywood, you don’t know if you’re going to end up in a latrine, or in a hole…. The overcrowding is such that up to eight people live in a little 3 by 3 [meter or 10 by 10 foot] house,” said Castro.
The ground gave way to the water pressure in one of the houses in the Hollywood neighborhood, located next to the ravine.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
At least 15 people live on María’s land. Her house is built on wooden stilts, the alternative that more and more people in the neighborhood are choosing.
Below the house, a row of doors made of sheets of metal lead to the rooms where two of her daughters live with her grandchildren. In the front part of the lot, a series of improvised rooms house seven people, including Gerónima Sandoval and her family.
Gerónima Sandoval le alquila a María desde hace seis meses. Ella es de Chontales, un departamento a 180 kilómetros de Managua, la capital de Nicaragua.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
During the three floods, Nosara firefighters went through the neighborhood in a boat to rescue Maria, her family and her tenants.
The emergency doesn’t end when the rain stops. “Most of the houses there have dirt floors, so when it rains, it creates a muddy mess. The impact on people continues for at least two months afterwards,” said firefighter Castro.
Even though the water has subsided and the glimmer of the sun has peeked out, the ground in Hollywood looks saturated with water. The areas around the houses look like swamps, the road is full of puddles, and the neighborhood smells of feces. To the chief of the fire unit, Bombard, the end of the rains puts them on alert for diseases and bacteria to which these low-income families are exposed.
“That is the biggest problem. Dengue and the pools of bacteria and diseases. There’s a lot of water and that’s the most serious thing right now,” Bombard commented.
In the third week of the month, the rains subsided in Guanacaste. For the families, that’s just the first step to recovery. Everything they lost becomes rubble that remains on the still wet ground and exposes them to new dangers, such as dengue.Photo: César Arroyo Castro
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In El Bambú and in Hollywood, they talk about Tropical Storm Sara as if they were describing a familiar routine: the river overflowed, they tried to rescue the belongings that they could, they lost appliances and mattresses, and they slept in a shelter.
When the storms pass and the water returns to its natural course, the cameras disappear and the news channels go back to their regular programming, but the flooded communities take years to recover. With each sign that the Las Palmas or Nosara rivers are rising, the people who live in these neighborhoods already know by heart what they will experience.
The shelters will be set up again, boats will come to the rescue in the communities, and mattresses and food with the CNE seal will arrive. And the cycle will repeat again and again until the country gives priority to preventive measures for disaster instead of emergency response, a necessary focus according to geographer Adolfo Quesada Román.
And until that happens, María Villarreal, in her house full of mud, will continue to lament the same thing: “We live with the floods because we don’t have anywhere to go. If I had somewhere to live, a small lot where this doesn’t happen, you tell me, who wouldn’t be happy to be able to go where they don’t have to live waiting for it to flood every rainy season.”
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