Jeddah Suffers

I recently wrote about water shortages in Jeddah and how scuffles broke out between people queing to buy tanker-loads of water. Jeddah is now suffering from another problem - flooding!

After two years without any rain, heavy overnight rain last Sunday caused extensive flooding in Jeddah.

The photographs are from "The Saudi Gazzette". (I hope they don't sue me for copyright enfringement.) An article in the same newspaper commenting on the floods was entitled "Water, Water Everywhere ...". The flood water had mixed with raw sewage to become a disgusting brown sludge. The last thing you would want to do is drink it.

This rainfall was to my experience, un-seasonally early. Usually, it only rains sometime between the end of November and February. Some years you only get a few showers, some years you get a lot of rain. During the winter before I came out here, it was cloudy and rainy almost continuously for about three months. Since then, winters have been drier, sometimes with only a few showers. A few years ago the late King Fahd asked everyone to pray for rain since it had been so dry.

There is usually an abrupt drop in temperature, usually in late November. It can go from a pleasant 80F (27C) to below 70F (21C) in a few days. Sometimes, this change in climate is accompanied by the first rain of winter. If this happens, the temperatures can drop more than 10F (5C) literally overnight.

Mind you, we have become somewaht accustomed to the warm weather. When it falls below 80F (27C) it seems quite chilly to those of us who have been here some time.

The rain usually starts with a few fat drops of warm rain; sometimes, that's it - the rains stops after only a brief shower. Other times, it becomes a torrential downpour often accompanied by thunder and lightning, as happened in Jeddah. Very rarely do we ever get anything in-between.

The attitude of the authorities to rain in Saudi Arabia seems very similar to that towards snow in the UK. Most winters you only get a little of it for only a few weeks so it's not worth spending money on it! Most roads are not build with any drainage, so as soon as you get a heavy downpour, it immediately floods, as we saw in Jeddah.

After having no rain for ten months the roads are covered in a thin layer of oil, rubber and other grime. This mixes with the rainwater to produce a filthy black liquid.

Even when the rain is falling, the water is not clean. The air in Saudi contains is full of a fine brown dust powder. More when it's been windy, less when the air is still bit it's always there. Even in an aroplane, you only get above the dust at about 30,000 ft. If we have only had a light shower in the night, I can tell by the brown spots on my car in the morning. If it was a lot of rain my car would be covered in this brown muck!

The other problem with the rain is the traffic, or rather the drivers. In the same way that UK drivers are unused to driving in snow, Saudi drivers are unused to rain. Some drivers are very fearful of any water on the road and drive at 10-20 m.p.h. even on the highways, while others seem to think that it's not neccessary to slow down at all. The result, as you can imagine is even more accidents than usual.

A mischievious friend of mine, who is no longer in Saudi Arabia, used to go "thobe splashing" in his car every time it rained. A thobe is the long white cotten dress-like garment worn by most gulf arabs. It may well be more comfortable in the summer heat, but it is not very practical in the wet!