I tried to put this blog into retirement, but received a deluge of comments asking me not to (mostly from Anna). So I'm playing with the Blogger app on my phone, which is a work in process I admit, to hopefully start mobile blogging.
In the meantime, here's a photo of one of my very cool Christmas presents - a long-handled wire-brush scraper for removing the moss and weeds from block paving. I did the whole drive in a couple of hours today. Brill. Thanks Noah and Anna!
Testing of photo uploaded via Blogger app: can't centralise this photo. Huh. Olly
We join the Liberian people in celebrating the re-opening of Liberia's Mount Coffee hydro-electric plant, and re-commissioning of the distribution network.
The plant was built in the early 1960s and generated 64 megawatts, but was damaged in 1990 during a period of fighting, when the river overflowed and washed away one of the dams thus rendering the plant useless. The generation house was then systematically looted for scrap metal until it was secured in 2007, when I visited, by which time there was nothing left except the concrete structure. Meanwhile, most of the pylons, cable, transformers - in fact the whole distribution system into Monrovia - was also looted, and any remaining parts of the system became overgrown with foliage.
Rehabilitation of the plant began in May 2012, and suffered an 8 month delay during the Ebola crises, but the plant came on-line on 15th December 2016, and will eventually generate 88 megawatts.
Watch a very cool video on the rehabilitation here:
