Right before dawn, I woke up to the sound of thunder and heavy rain on my windows. I love laying in bed listening to the rain at night - it gives me a peaceful feeling.
After listening for a few minutes though, I heard the sound of water dripping inside my house. With a sigh, I threw aside my covers, swung my feet over the side of the bed and...
SPLASH!
...onto the floor.
Rain in this part of Saudi Arabia is such a rare event that one cannot help but feel excited, but after ten minutes of sweeping water out of my bedroom and bailing it off of my balcony, I was praying for it to stop.
Heavy rain is something like a natural disaster because the infrastructure here is not designed to handle water.
Homes flooded, streets flooded, and the mobile phone network was knocked out for a while.
The rain was pretty incredible, we must have got three inches in just under an hour (about 7.5 cm). The weather network says that Jeddah only gets 54 mm of Rain every year - we've exceeded our limit for the next 1.5 years in one night!
As I was walking around taking pictures, I waved to my other neighbors who were also cleaning the water out of their houses.
Beautiful morning though.
How is the water getting in the house? Leaks in the roof or running downhill from the balcony into the house? Time for mold remediation? :)
ReplyDeleteJust to let you know I did a post on Tara's blog on the flooding and linked this one, as well as giving credit for the pics I used. I was also able to include pics of KAU in Jeddah from a Jeddan friend:
ReplyDeletehttp://taraummomar.blogspot.com/2009/11/hajj-and-eid-al-adha-2009the-unforeseen.html