Building Bridges for Rainy Season
Building bridges for rainy season
Photo: One of Stronghold’s wire bridges in Burma. The river pictured here is at its low point for the year, but it will become many times larger during rainy season.
The summer months in Burma are known as “rainy season”.
During rainy season, continuous rainstorms swell the rivers to 10 times their normal size — making travel almost impossible in places that have no bridges.
Although our ambulances cannot cross most of the rivers during rainy season, we still need to move critical patients across the rivers to ambulances waiting on the other side.
Photo: Engineers from Rain Tree Clinic helped us build the carts that will carry the patients.
To make this happen, we constructed temporary wire-bridges which allow our teams to pull patients across the river in a cart.
Previously, groups of men from local villages would have to hand-carry patients long distances up mountain trails to find a place where they could safely carry a patient across, and it could take up to 3 or 4 days to get a patient to the hospital.
Now, our wire bridges will reduce the transport time for criticial patients by 12 to 24 hours.
This is our first year constructing these temporary bridges and we plan to improve and expand our rainy season preparations every year.
Photo: Villagers help to construct a raised platform to make sure the cart can be raised high enough to avoid the river at its high point.
Photo: The completed platform and wire bridge.
Photo: The view from the cart will look a lot different during rainy season when the river is 5 times deeper.
Thank you to everyone for supporting Stronghold and making our life-saving work possible.