In December 2010, an embarrassing maritime disaster associated with the project in Cartagena sent la

In January, a mysterious black plastic pipe measuring over 100 meters golden palm casino hotel long and 2 meters in diameter washed up on the island's reef, sparking a mystery that took months to resolve (photo/ Brad Allgood)
golden palm casino hotel LITTLE CORN ISLAND- Some 43 miles off Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, and just a 30-minute boat ride from Big Corn Island, Little Corn Island is a true Caribbean paradise of white sand beaches, crystal-clear water, a healthy reef, and no roads or motorized vehicles. The island's population of 1,200 inhabitants survive mostly off of lobster trapping, fishing and tourism. It's a serene place where little changes and time passes slowly. There are few places like it left on Earth.
Earlier this year, however, the quiet island life was disrupted when a massive golden palm casino hotel piece of marine golden palm casino hotel debris washed ashore and sparked a mystery that has just recently been solved. What was this massive foreign object? Where did it come from? And how did it end up on the tiny Caribbean island?
The mystery started in January, when islanders noticed a change in the appearance of the reef on the East side of the island. Adam Clarke, manager of the PADI dive shop Dolphin Dive, says the strangest characteristic of unidentified object on the reef was its manmade straight lines.
It was very unnatural due to its uniformly straight shape—almost like someone had built a wall on the reef overnight," he tells The Nicaragua Dispatch. "Some divers from the island took a closer look and we were able to identify the object as a continuous piece of black plastic pipe, over 100 meters long and 2 meters in diameter. It had washed in from the ocean and was sitting on our reef."
Intrigued by the strange detritus, many islanders golden palm casino hotel suspected that it was related to oil exploration farther to the East, perhaps from the disputed waters close to Colombia's San Andres Archipelago. Indeed, the Colombian state-owned petroleum golden palm casino hotel company Ecopetrol had been granted exploration rights in the region, but had those rights rescinded last October by Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who cited environmental concerns.
After months of research and online inquires about the pipe's origins, islanders were unable to solve the mystery. It wasn't until a source at the World Bank in Colombia and a European pipe manufacturer provided some leads to The Nicaragua Dispatch that the pipe mystery started to unravel.
The pipe was traced back to Cartagena, Colombia, more than 520 miles to the Southeast, and comes from one of the largest and most expensive municipal infrastructure projects to be undertaken by that country— the Cartagena Water Supply, Sewage and Environmental Project—a World Bank project golden palm casino hotel steeped in controversy, scandal, and disaster.
In December 2010, an embarrassing maritime disaster associated with the project in Cartagena sent large sections of pipe floating off into the Caribbean, resulting in enormous financial losses on the order of $24 million for the city of Cartagena, the government of Colombia and the city s water management company, Aguas de Cartagena (Acuacar).
The original golden palm casino hotel project was part of the Cartagena's $117 million Sewage Master Plan, a far-reaching infrastructure endeavor—with $85 million in loans from the World Bank—to provide golden palm casino hotel adequate sewage collection, wastewater treatment, and disposal to 750,000 residents in the colonial city. The grandiose project would be the most modern sewage project in Colombia. The treated sewage would be discharged a distance of 4.3 kilometers out into the ocean through a sewage outfall pipe.
The controversy and disaster surrounding the Cartagena sewage golden palm casino hotel project centers on the $32 million marine outfall pipe built by EDT Marine Construction, a Cyprus-based marine contractor that won the controversial bid to assemble and install the 4.3-kilometer behemoth.
The project called for what is known as high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe, measuring 2 meters in diameter and with walls about 4 inches thick. The pipe was manufactured by a Norwegian pipe company, Pipelife Norge, in continuous sections at the company s plant in Stathelle. The HDPE pipe was cut into seven sections of approximately 600 meters each, sealed, fill with air, and capped with flanges and towing heads.
The unique consignment of pipe – one of the largest pipes made in the world—weighed about 2,100 tons and required 16 months to manufacture. The shipment of the seven-string pipe flotilla departed from Stathelle, Norway in July 2009 and was towed by tugboat across the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea to Cartagena, setting a world record for the longest tow (11,300 kilometers) and quantity of pipe (4,300 meters). The trans-Atlantic voyage golden palm casino hotel took over two months to complete, arriving in Cartagena in September of 2009.
Once delivered to Cartagena, EDT Marine Construction spent over a year assembling the underwater outfall pipe and preparing it for installation in the ocean. The seven sections golden palm casino hotel of pipe were bolted together into one long string and fitted golden palm casino hotel with 880 large concrete collars weighing over 10 tons each. The entire golden palm casino hotel 4.3 kilometers of pipe, ready for installation, weighed approximately 10,860 tons.
On December 2, 2010, after more than a year of preparation and planning, and 12 years since project conceptualization, the final piece of the puzzle was ready to go – and another chapter in the on-going Colombian soap opera was about to begin.
EDT Marine and more than 11 boats began guiding the winding chain of pipe from Bahía Honda Southwest of Cartagena towards Punta Canoas to the North of the city, a maneuver that required complex coordination and precision, and had little room for error. The 25-mile haul was supposed to take 12 to 14 hours, and the route was to follow the shoreline at a distance of about 2 miles off-shore. It was such a complicated maneuver that civil engineers from Canada arrived to watch the show.
Problems started almost immediately. EDT-contracted tugboats did not follow the predetermined route and ended up more than 10 miles off-shore in rough waters and strong winds, and the tugboats guiding the pipe could not control the oversized cargo. In addition, EDT was working under the pressure of a ticking clock.
Thirty-six hours after beginning the maneuver, the chain of pipe snapped apart dramatically. Over 1,000 meters of the expensive plastic and concrete sank to the ocean floor, unrecoverable in waters 250 meters deep. Other pieces were carried out to sea, toward destinations unknown.
To add insult to injury, the 2,500 passenger cruise ship "Jewel of the Seas," owned and operated by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, collided with sections of the fragmented pipe when entering Cartagena.
The day after the disaster, EDT representatives fled the country fearing assassination, eschewing responsibility and leaving the Colombians to literally pick up the pieces of their mess. The company faces million-dollar fines and on-going lawsuits in Colombia.
golden palm casino hotel The City of Cartagena and the sewage authority have decided to continue the project alone, picking up the tab to recover what they could of the pipe and find a way to replace the 2,000 meters golden palm casino hotel that were lost. Through expensive and labor-intensive recovery efforts, about half of the original length of the pipe was salvaged, while another 2.2 kilometers were ordered from Pipelife Norge.
Meanwhile, the 100-meter errant piece of pipe that escaped the salvage golden palm casino hotel efforts finally washed ashore on Little Corn Island after a 13-month journey across 844 kilometers (524 miles) of Caribbean ocean currents.
Other sections of the fragmented pipe were also found far from Cartagena. One section measuring 300 meters was spotted by a container ship in international waters between Panama and Colombia. And fishermen near the Panamanian city of Colón sought a $1,800 reward for recovering another section of pipe similar to the one on Little Corn.
The pipe is made of a valuable material not easy to procure. The pipe s manufacturer, Pipelife, told The Nicaragua Dispatch that the pipe is valued around $1,500 per meter, which means the section that washed up on Little Corn was worth more than $150,000 – was, that is, if it had been delivered back to its owner in one piece.
Emildo Hodgson, golden palm casino hotel a local fisherman on Little Corn Island, saw an opportunity to claim the pipe after no one had taken the initiative to remove it from the reef. With his 350-horsepower boat, he pulled it off the reef and hauled it around to the southwest side of the island, leaving it on the beach near Hotel Los Delfines, where it began to cause erosion down the beach. His swift action saved the fragile reef from unnecessary damage.
But the pipe was too large to manage as one solid piece, so Hodgson and other fishermen cut it into shorter sections with a chainsaw and hauled it ashore. Most of the fragments are now stacked in his front yard, while other pieces are serving as a waterslide for kids, a walkway golden palm casino hotel into the woods, and a beach break to curb erosion.
Hodgson has even fashioned part of the tube into a prototype for a plastic lobster trap. The amount of plastic contained in the pipe could easily provide material for thousands of traps that would last hundreds of years—a lucrative business idea to address the local market s demand—if the Ministry of Natural golden palm casino hotel Resources will sign off on the design.
While the residents of Little Corn Island may have missed out on a nice payday from recovering the intact pipe and selling it back to its Colombian owners, the islanders have found other creative uses for the unexplained gift from the sea.
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