A great stage now gone

The few people that follow this blog will have noticed that there’s been no activity for the past week. The first few days were because of some laziness on my part, but then by the weekend something happened – there was a huge catastrophe here in Madeira Island, with large mudslides ruining the center of the main city Funchal, and wrecking large parts of Ribeira Brava and the nearby villages of Tabua, Serra d’Água and Lugar de Baixo. At least 42 people have perished (likely quite some more) and hundreds have become homeless. It is a tragedy.

I live in Calheta, an area where there were a few isolated incidents (sadly 3 people have died), but nothing like in Funchal and Ribeira Brava, and so myself, the family and closest friends are absolutely fine. However, communications failed for a while and the blog stopped, as motorsport fell down the priority order of things to worry about. One of the things that should be worried about now is the roads around the island. Rocks and mud occupied many of them, most can be cleaned up and made safe in a relatively short time, but one place where things are very serious is the connection between São Vicente and Ribeira Brava, which cuts across the island. Some bits of the road simply fell down the mountain, tragically together with houses and people. This connection will certainly prove difficult and slow to rebuild, although there are some plans already to make a new tunnel to fix this.

Map of Madeira Island

The main consequence of the non-existence of the road is that the people of the area, and the people of São Vicente and other nearby populations of the north, will now take much, much longer to travel to Funchal. There are also other side-effects, which although completely irrelevant next to the grief of the families that have lost their own, are relevant for the theme of this blog. What I’m trying to get at, is that this will bring severe headaches to the organizers of the Rali Vinho da Madeira, to be run next August. Not only a main connection road will probably be cut off, but it affects one of the most famous special stages of the competition, the one connecting Rosário to Serra d’Água, always starting with a climb towards the mountain and ending with a crazy quick downhill part, whichever direction it was being run at.

I am not entirely sure whether the large damages were in part of the stage or further lower down, but regardless, it is worth bringing back images of the competition there. The following video is an onboard recording of it, albeit in the wrong direction as the opposite one was a little more spectacular. This is in memory not just of the stage, but also, most importantly, of the dead in the area, as the enthusiastic population of the area is going through some very tough times.