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Thursday, February 10, 2011
Returning briefly to the topic of adaptively reused bomb craters, we stumbled upon the above image during a recent nighttime googlegasm. We can't see any signs of aquaculture, such as the jutting scaffoldings of hatchery pens, but National Geographic does assure us that those craters “now serve as fishponds.”
Yet again quoting Places:
These scars are still very much a part of the Vietnamese landscape. In Quang Binh and Vinh Linh provinces (just nort and south of the former demilatrized zone) the landscape resembles the face of the moon, with craters 30 to 50 feet in diameter and several yards deep.
Villagers have transformed the bomb craters into ponds for growing fish, a staple of the Vietnamese diet. In the south, bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replinashable source of protein at the doorstep.
One house here, another house there, and still more over there. Soon a city accretes around these calderas, its neighborhoods encircling, like atolls, a necklace of aqueous farmlands, while nearby streets ripple out like wavelets dissipating from the point of impact.
All unexploded ordnances may have long been found and disposed, the soil fully remediated of tactical herbicides and defoliants, all traces of war erased, except of course these bomb craters permanently embedded into the urban grid.
