Snow!

Snow in Sofar

And the deluge continues. It was high time to check out this pile of snow that was supposedly dumped on us at 600 meters by this ‘ferocious storm’: That turned out to be a little inaccurate. No serious snow to be detected until some 1500 meters above sea level. With a 4 x 4 and balls of steel, you can get anywhere in this country, and so we did. My son – who recently got his driver’s license - has to learn how to drive in snow (as stipulated by his father), before we let him go off on his own car to the ski slopes, and so today’s goal was to find snow. Way up in the mountains above Beirut, near Falougha, we found plenty of it; it was beautiful and white.

Road 'cracked up' and barred 

And although it did rain all day, it wasn't so much the actual storm that caused a problem, but rather the water erosion that stems from it. Massive urbanization all over the mountains in the past ten years has uprooted trees, and moved huge amounts of rocks and soil, all of which are now running downhill with the water. The mountain sides are saturated with the water, and rock slides were all over the pace. In some cases entire parts of the road had been swept away, or were about to be swept away.   

Road flooded over, and partially swept away

I know it is all very sad – the youngest victim was a 7-month old child of a shepherd family that was swept away when his family’s tent suddenly flooded – but this extreme violence caused by nature is very impressive, as far as I am concerned.

Did this Michel Hayek dude predict this storm? If not, can we finally fire him?

In the snow above Falougha