Lame after-the-fact updates

As most of you know, I actually left Egypt four months ago today. Before departing, I wrote, but never posted several blog updates. Not quite sure why I never got my act together to get them on my website, it wasn’t like I was overworked or anything. Nevertheless, before I start reporting on my new adventure in Botswana, I figured I should really close out my time in Egypt. There are several parts which I may break up into a few posts so it’s not too long. So here we go with biblical floods…

Torrential rains and the desert aren't two things that I think normally go together, but in keeping with the strange weather around the world, the Sinai had record amounts of rain and biggest floods in over 50+ years. Normally February is the "rainy" month, but we started with the never-ending and very annoying sand storms in the fall instead of the winter and the rain early in December. We had about three solid days of rain just after the New Year which didn’t seem like to big of a deal since we were not out doing missions, and I was holed up in my hooch.

I never really thought about it, but when you get rain in the desert, it really doesn’t have anywhere to go. Put that together with the “wadis” all over the Sinai which are basically dry valleys cut into the landscape during these rare events, and you have a big problem. Since these types of rains only happen once in a generation, people tend to forgot and build their homes and plant orchards right in the middle of the wadi (sounds very familiar to all those people in the Mississippi flood plain, hmmm…).

On the morning of the third day of rain, we heard that the flooding along the Israeli-Egyptian border was so bad that an Israeli Defense Force armored vehicle actually washed across the border into Egypt, and the two soldiers inside had to be rescued by the Egyptians soldiers. Funny when you think it was the first time the Israeli military crossed onto Egyptian territory since the peace treaty, but I guess it doesn’t count in this case. We heard that bridges had washed away on the Israeli side, that roads were closed all the way down to Sharm El Sheik, and that we were trapped on in north camp due to the flooding in nearby El Arish (with the only major road back to Cairo).

When the rain finally stopped on the fourth day, we decided to hop into the Blackhawk helicopters and get a birds-eye view of what was going on. As we flew westward down the coast of the Mediterranean towards El Arish I saw the ocean turned to a strange brown color with a significant amount of flotsam when were within a few kilometers of the city. We were all a bit perplexed until we got closer and realized that a “no longer dormant” wadi running through the middle of the city was now a raging river about 100 meters wide destroying everything in its path, including about 5 bridges, countless homes, and even several four story apartment buildings (there was video on YouTube of an actual building collapsing into the water). It was really shocking to see, and as we followed the wadi south, we saw that most of the roads in the area were totally destroyed. A river cut across one we regularly drove eroding the one side into a 10 foot waterfall. The destruction to the orchards was really heartbreaking to see. So many people depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and I’d guess thousands of olive and peach trees washed away into the sea.

To say that the Egyptian government was unprepared for destruction on such a vast scale is an understatement. They attempted to provide some displaced person camps (i.e. army tents) in some of the worse affected areas, but it was too little too late. Of course the Bedouins living out in the desert were the most affected, and since there isn’t any love lost between them and the Egyptians, the aid was even slower in coming than it would have been for a similar event west of the Suez Canal. As for the damage to infrastructure, I’d guess it will literally be years before things are back to the way they were, if they ever again.