Two weeks ago in Caracas, I was continuously monitoring Globovision TV and El Universal newspaper for information about Viaduct 1 leading to Maiquetia airport. There was a real concern that the damn thing would collapse. It was the listing bridge on the only highway leading to the airport.

Rains came down, and shifted the mountains, twisting the steel and cement linking bridge over a steep ravine.

Without that highway and without that bridge, there was no getting out of Caracas. I began to consider how I could get to Maracaibo or some other city with an international airport if it came to that. The bridge was listing, twisting, its buttressing pillars slanted and skewed. The highway was cracked and buckling. But getting out without the bridge would probably involve travel for days.

Not that the inland highway out of Caracas was much better. It too was twisted by the shifts of the mudsliding mountains. It was pulled apart, with fresh lacerated holes on its highway ribbon stretch, like overpulled taffy. The raw, wide, ragged gaps provided a long view to the bottom of a deep ravine, nothing to break one’s fall. Cars drove around those holes, even in heavy traffic, prefering to wait in line than drive over the taffy-pullings.

Meanwhile, one side of the highway had collapsed, a big half-moon circular bite taken out of it, as if by some aerial Jaws. At night, the ragged, bitten-out void was edged by incandescently blazing garbage cans, all flame, put there by the highway workers, warning drivers to stay out of the maw.

Caracas.

Today, that bridge was declared a lost cause and all traffic was stopped on it. Its supporting pillars were listing too disastrously. Nothing could save it. Miguel Octavio has the whole set of scary pictures of the spectacular collapse about to happen – and they’re a must-see here.

The Viaduct was built back in 1953. To construct another would take at least six months. Hugo Chavez has been in power since the beginning of 1999. He’s been repeatedly warned that the bridge was in trouble, but always brushed off the reports as media hype. He did nothing to remedy the situation. Meanwhile, his vice president, Jose Rangel, actually claimed he was surprised by the whole episode and had no idea anything was going on. He’s lying of course, but it’s entirely real that this collapse that will maroon Caracas, was the product of neglect. Six million people will be cut off from any easy means of exit.

Once again, it reminds me of Jim Jones and the return to the jungle, the decivilization, the grand dreams, the big spending, and the final collapse. So many things in Venezuela strike the memory of Jim Jones, whose life and work I read of, years ago.

It makes one think Venezuela and Guyana really are the same country. Francisco Toro has another excellent piece on this coming collapse of the Viaduct here. The Financial Times links this bridge outage with likely additional food shortages, given the amount of food that’s hauled in from the airport, here.