Margen
Marisa, I'm writing from the office at half past nine at night because the Aroa file went out this afternoon and my signature is inside it. I need you to read this today, not on Monday.
Here is what we did, since you weren't there.
The survey was on 2 September. We were hired for the field work only: locate markers H-41 to H-53 on the stretch between the north beacon and the old groyne, check them and measure. That is what we did, and we did it properly. I'm attaching a scan of the field book.
The three markers that matter are H-46, H-47 and H-48. Their coordinates, in the system used for this, are these:
H-46: X 412,742.100; Y 4,809,744.210; elevation 3.09. H-47: X 412,695.660; Y 4,809,772.610; elevation 3.11. H-48: X 412,651.380; Y 4,809,801.440; elevation 3.14.
They match digit for digit those in document 17 of the file itself, the verification of bases from February 2019. All three are concrete blocks with a central nail and all three are where they were. I measured from the nail of H-47 to the south-east corner of the house on plot 3,118: 18.39 metres. In 2019 they noted 18.42. Three centimetres in seven years, which is what happens when nobody touches anything.
This is what I need you to understand before I go on: no marker has been moved and no coordinate has been changed. If anyone tells you there was a setting-out error, it is a lie. The markers are perfect.
What has moved is the elevation.
The line of the public domain is not fixed by the markers. It is fixed by the elevation the sea reaches in the greatest known storms; the markers only support the measurement. The line approved in 2014, and kept in the 2019 campaign, ran at elevation 3.11. The proposal that went out this afternoon runs at elevation 4.55.
One metre forty-four centimetres of height. On the gradient of that stretch, that is 27.79 metres inland.
Measured from the 2014 line, the west wall of the house stands at 26.42 metres. Do the subtraction yourself.
The house is from 1964, 86 square metres on a plot of 312, with a depth of eight metres from the east façade. One storey, four openings facing the sea. The owner is Arturo Leal Cifuentes, sixty-three, a retired shipwright, registered as living there since 1981. His daughter Clara was born inside it on 17 January 1990; it is in the family record book and in the report by Remedios Vilar Puga, midwife, which places the birth in the room the plan calls bedroom 2. With the new line, those 86 square metres fall inside the public domain. The house is still standing, still with number 14 on the letterbox, and it stops being his.
Now I'll tell you where elevation 4.55 comes from, because it is the one point where I raised my hand and I want it on record that I raised it.
In the 2019 wave study, folios 401 to 468, there is a record of the storm of 11 January 2019. It says: maximum elevation reached, 4.55 metres. Estimated return period, 58 years. Classification, exceptional. And on the last line, "not computable for delimitation purposes."
In the same file there is an addendum from this year, folios 1,104 to 1,109, signed on 21 August. It recalculates that same storm of 11 January 2019. It gives it the same maximum elevation, 4.55. It gives it a return period of 43 years. It classifies it as ordinary and declares it computable.
The return period is the number of years that on average pass between two storms of that size. It is a calculated number, not a measured one. The addendum uses the series from the Aroa buoy extended with the records for 2024 and 2025, and that lengthening brings the number below the fifty-year threshold. At 58 it did not count. At 43 it counts. The same wave, the same day, the same height.
I said so to Elisa Bernal, the engineer instructing the file, while we were setting out. She placed on record, in these words, that the elevation of the sea is the same in both documents and that what has changed is the number of years attributed to the storm. She asked for the survey of that stretch to be suspended and for a specific hearing to be opened on the addendum. She asked at twenty-four minutes past nine in the morning, and she asked properly.
At nine forty-one, Rubén Salgado, the head of the demarcation, filed a note he had written himself at half past seven. It says the addendum does not change field measurements but the statistical classification of a storm already documented, and that this classification formed part of the technical study submitted to public consultation at the time. Elisa answered that the study submitted to public consultation classified that storm as exceptional and that the addendum classifies it the other way round. He replied that the purpose of the record was to verify the execution of the plan, not to review the criteria by which it was drawn. And he ordered us to continue.
They are each right within their own terms, and that is what is keeping me awake. He has invented nothing: he is applying a paper that exists. She is not exaggerating either: that paper says today the opposite of what it said in 2019.
Before writing to you I went back through the whole 2019 study, all sixty-eight folios, looking for one specific thing: any new measurement of the sea between 2019 and today that would justify raising the elevation. There is none. There is no bathymetric campaign, no later storm reaching higher, no report saying the wave climate on that stretch has changed. The only thing that has changed hands in seven years is the statistical calculation of a storm that had already been measured. If you find something I've missed, tell me tonight and I'll keep quiet.
I measured the shoreline observed in the field, the one the sea actually leaves. Against the previous campaign it varies between 0.24 and 0.62 metres. Between twenty-four and sixty-two centimetres. The delimitation advances 27.79 metres.
The file's deadline expired today at 23:59, twenty-four months from the publication of the commencement order on 24 September 2024. At 13:52 Salgado signed the proposal and ordered it sent. It goes out under entry RE-2026-88431 and up to the Ministry for approval by ministerial order. Elisa signed every page to record her technical verification and maintained her reservation at folio 1,117. My field book is inside, with my name on it.
What I am asking for is specific. One: that the firm write to the demarcation tomorrow saying that our work certifies the position of the markers and nothing else, and that it does not endorse the elevation. Two: that this letter goes in through the register, not by telephone. Three: that you tell me whether I can speak to the owner, because I ran into him at the door this afternoon and I didn't know what to say to him.
Arturo filed his submissions on the 15th, within the fifteen working days. They are handwritten and I have read them all. There is one paragraph I have been repeating all afternoon: "The sea has not risen a centimetre between the two sheets: what has risen is the calculation."
When the proposal came through, they handed him the application form for a concession to occupy his own house, generated automatically, with his details already printed and the space for the duration left blank. Elisa asked him whether he wanted to file it today.
He said: "Don't give me permission to live in the room where my daughter was born."