With the North Cooling, the Corridor Crews Race the Calendar

CARTAGENA — All summer the desalination corridor's construction crews worked before dawn and after dusk and gave the middle of the day back to the heat. This week they got the day back. As the temperate north cools, the crews building and maintaining the corridor's coastal skids have resumed full-shift work — and are now racing a different clock, the narrow maintenance window between the summer's punishing heat and the winter's sea-storm season, when the coastal works get harder and slower again. "For four months the enemy was the sun; we lost the afternoons to it," said site foreman Diego Alarcón, walking a line of intake pipe on a coast that has finally let its workers stand upright at noon. "Now the enemy is the calendar. Whatever we don't finish before the cold, we carry to spring." The work is unglamorous — replacing membranes, re-seating pumps, extending the intake that feeds the corridor cities whose taps this paper reported still running. But it is the maintenance that keeps the margin the hydrologists warned was thin from getting thinner. The crews have perhaps six weeks. They intend to use all of them.