9/16/09 L-Abrid Ibbi Addendum (Rated PG-13 – Kiddies, stop reading)

I'm serious about the rating. This is not for children.

I used to feel irritated when the decision was made to close a road due to flooding. I figured that drivers are smart enough to know whether or not to try to cross a shallowly-flooded road, and that if they’re willing to go for it, if they know/believe that their vehicle is heavy enough to make it, then they should get to try it.

I don’t feel that anymore.

Just in the past week, there have been three major accidents, all related to floodwaters. In one, a small transit with three passengers washed entirely off the road, was swept down the river, and was never seen again. As my host mother grimly said, “They’re probably down at the dam, being eaten by fish.” Elsewhere, a bus driver overcompensated, the wheels locked up, and the whole many-ton bus flipped sideways, killing four. Just this afternoon, a transit driver did something similar, killing himself and the jumper clinging to the back. A friend of mine witnessed this one; the other two stories have spread like wildfire through the region. Four unrelated people asked if I’d heard about the washed-away transit and its 3 casualties.

In a country with as much desert as Morocco, it’s hard to see rain as anything but a blessing. Hard, but not impossible.