Rain

The few times it's rained in Libya this year, I've managed to be out of the country. This week I finally got to see it rain in Tripoli. It sprinkled off and on earlier this week, but nothing that lasted for more than a few minutes. Today was more than a little shower though. It rained pretty hard for over an hour. The street has a pretty high crown, but the curb is a foot tall just to give you an idea of the depth.

Looking around it became evident pretty quickly that things around here weren't designed for that kind of rain. Designed is probably the wrong word to use. The general consensus of course is that nothing in Libya has actually been "designed". The did anticipate the occasional rainfall though. The patios around my building are built with a slight grade so that they do drain. Great idea. It's works just fine to drain the rooftop off when you're cleaning it, or there is a light sprinkle. The problem is that the entire system, rooftop and patios, drains out through a single 3 inch opening at the far end above the ground floor. That little pipe couldn't quite keep up with the runoff. The water shooting out of the end was going about 5 feet.

The patios backed up and began flooding out the AC units on them. There were also some leaks coming through the ceilings on the first floor. Our lower patio looked to be in worse shape than the neighbor's. Although for all I know, they could have their drain pipes dumping into ours.

We decided to walk around to check out the flooding. The streets had about a foot of water in them. The storm sewer system in Gargeresh Street doubles as the sanitary sewer system too. Ideally this would all flow into the lift station down by the shoreline and be pumped back uphill to the treatment plant. What actually happens is that the LS fills up because the pumps in it have been broken for the better part of 2 decades and everything overflows into the sea. This means there's a fair amount of sewage backed up through the system even on a good day. A good portion of the "water" coming down the street was a mixture of rain and raw sewage. The smell was worse in some places than others. Needless to say we made sure to wash off when we got back home after walking around.

One of the Libyans saw me taking pictures and told me to take this one of the flooded streets with the garbage sitting on the curb. I don't think he was too impressed with the quality of his surroundings.