Climbing on a Shrimp Farm Aqueduct in India

I visited a huge shrimp farm in India today. It employs 700 people, giving them free breakfast, lunch and dinner. The farm is fully integrated, with their own hatchery and feed mill to boot -- big and sprawling across the sun-baked southeastern Indian coast.

This was the first shrimp farm I've seen that had such a large concrete aqueduct system carrying quality seawater for the shrimps, stretching far from the beach -- further than most fishing piers in the USA.

Of course, I insisted on checking it out thoroughly by climbing it with the farm manager and my local guys. Here he is, talking to his employees by walkie-talkie. You can see the reservoir and shrimp ponds in the distance. This coast was hit hard by the tsunami and various cyclones now and again, but they told me it only killed about 20 people in this area:




Here's me at the end of the reservoir in the lower pumping area. They pump the seawater upwards toward the aqueduct and then let gravity carry it to the inland reservoir before being allowed to drain into the ponds by dikes.



This is one of the 600 horsepower electric motors that powers the pumps. These fuckers are BEASTS. These pipes are like two feet in diameter:



A view of the beach from the end of the aqueduct. This is about 300 km north of Chennai India -- an empty beach that no tourist ever sees or would desire to visit: