The Bunnie Blog
Living and Diving in Sharm el Sheikh
Jan
19
Desert Storm
Filed Under (Day to Day Stuff) by divebunnie on 19-01-2010 and tagged Egypt, hadaba, sharm el sheikh, sharm storm, sharm storm 2010
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So the other night I went to bed nice n early hoping to catch a few extra zzzz’s… but little did I know what was in store! It had been a weird day, kind of cloudy in the morning, and we had mentioned that rain had been predicted for the night. I had also noted that Monday looked pretty grim on the wind front too (never a good combination with diving). I had even brought the washing in (something we never have to do here), just in case the forecast came true, and had made sure my dive suits were well and truly attached to their hangers on the boat (again just in case). So back to my bed… I was soon woken by some thunderous grumblings in the distance, so ventured out onto our cliff to watch the impending doom approaching from the desert. In the distance I could see sheets of lightning over the mountains, followed by ominous rolls of thunder. It wasn’t long before these became huge flashes of light joined simultaneously by their earsplitting crashes of thunder. Of course by this stage I was tucked back up in my bed, looking out of our window that just happened to face into the oncoming storm. The lightning flashes were just continuous, like a strobe! None of this waiting around between strikes that I remember as a child, counting the seconds between flash then crash. It was all at once, and continual!! And then came the rain, proper torrential, thunderous, high-pressure-hose-like rain like I have never seen in Sharm before! Wow, I was impressed! So… I sat and watched. The storm sat right ontop of us for some time, before fading away, off to the East and across the rest of Sharm el Sheikh. Ahh, peace, we can sleep… hehe.. no such luck! We had three big storms land on us in the space of only a few hours, our house, being designed for the desert, soon started to show its cracks, and rain was just getting blown in through the gaps in the windows! Well who needs to seal them when it only rains properly once every five years or so? The cat spent the whole night hidden in a cupboard, eyes wide, thinking her little world was coming to an end, while I wandered the house, moving electrical items off the floors and plopping towels and rugs into the expanding puddle surrounding our bed. My neighbour didn’t fare quite so well… I popped round to find water flowing gently into her lounge, while upstairs, the air-conditioning unit had become a hose pipe, with water gushing out of it!! Shit! So by torchlight (thankfully the electric by this stage was out.. and not before time, I could hear it fizzing as the house got wetter and wetter) I went on the hunt for a bucket, rugs and towels, to at least try and stop the onslaught a touch. Thankfully it worked… to an extent. The next day, we woke to a newly washed and wet Sharm. Our pool could not be made out from the huge brown puddle spread across the patio… we went for a walk on the cliff to assess the scene in the Sea only to find weird patches of quick-sand like stuff, where the water had made the sand almost unstable! Ras Katy looked more like a muddy puddle too… you could see where the orange sand had just washed down into the sea, which looked positively opaque throughout the whole area! Wow! Needless to say there was no diving… well half the roads were flooded, so we couldn’t collect any guests, lightning was still flashing when I got up, there was no power, no phone lines, no moblie phones, no internet, no water supply. And even if we had dealt with the logistics and made it out on a boat, the viz looked shot to bits.. So it was a day off, which to be honest, most of us needed in order to dry out our homes… I think I have found three people who actually didn’t get flooded! Hehe.. With no phones, we took a wander around to see if friends were ok and to see if they needed help, but everyone seemed to be fine if a little soggy. Not much more than a bit of water. A few people had found their lap tops drowned, and the dive centre’s classroom was under a few inches of water. Some of the roads were flooded up to the car windows… not a good idea to drive today I feel. We were without power for about 20 odd hours, and I was just about to start cooking by candle light when lo! The lights turned on… Yay! It was only this morning that we got our mobile phones and therefore internet back however.. and our telly is still out  Well, I guess that gives us all something to talk about for the next few days hehe.
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