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It was becoming increasingly dark and menacing as storm clouds rolled into the skies over Beijing. A light rain was falling and the wind was picking up. Every few moments, someone in the office looked up to stare out the window at the wild scene that was only getting wilder as the minutes ticked by.
It was Thursday afternoon around 4:30 PM and many of us were racing to meet looming deadlines, but the crazy weather outside our mostly window-filled office was unbelievable. Soon most of my coworkers had plastered their faces against the window panes to stare out at the black sky and sheets of rain flying violently sideways. A veteran of years of tornado seasons, I was just about to warn them to stay away from the windows when there was a mighty crash of thunder that rattled the windows and made the lights in the office flicker on and off. The words of warning unnecessary, my colleagues scurried back to their work spaces, those with desks that flanked the windows doubling up with those working in the interior of the room. It was going to be a long night.
The sky remained dark and the rain
continued pounding down. Five-thirty, the designated company shuttle departure time, came and went with no sign of the driver, nor the shuttle. This was unusual for two reasons- first, he was nearly always parked in front of the office by a quarter to five, and secondly, he had not called to say he would be late.
My colleagues gathered around my desk as I dialed his number, putting the call on speakerphone. After an inordinate number of rings, he answered.
WEI! He sounded perturbed as he shouted into the phone.
I’m in the area, but a half hour’s walk from where I parked the shuttle for the day, the rain is coming down so hard and fast the streets are flooding, there is a lot of lightning and- f*#&%!(BADWIDTH)%!#(MISSING)@! We lost the connection for a moment.
I just dropped my phone in the water! The line went dead.
We all stared at each other in complete bewilderment. Where was he? Why was he so late? And how had he possibly managed to drop his phone into the flooded gutter? With no bus or subway lines near the office, and the meager chance the six of us could find
two taxis in the inclement weather (not to mention the astronomical expense, given how far we were from the city center), we were facing the prospect of spending the night in the office if the driver did not make an appearance soon.
I was testing how well the pilates ball I use as a desk chair would work as a pillow (verdict: epic fail) when there was a shout from the front office window, where some had gathered to watch the storm. The driver had just pulled up and was beckoning wildly at us through the windshield. Score! We would (possibly) make it home yet that evening.
The next hurdle we faced was how to get from the office to the waiting shuttle through the driving sheets of rain and brilliant flashes of lightning. The building management had a handsome collection of big, sturdy umbrellas available to borrow, but embracing my inner Mary Poppins didn’t seem like the smartest move at that point. One might think that a team of innovative engineers could design some sort of contraption on-the-spot to solve the problem, but their best recommendation was to “make a break for it.” (I am paraphrasing from
Chinese, but that was the gist of the suggestion). Super.
After racing to the shuttle between flashes of lightning and booms of thunder, I think we all felt a small sense of victory. It’s all about the little things in life, isn’t it? Unfortunately, our driver didn’t share the same sentiment. He was soaked from head to toe; he had been whiling away the daylight hours with local driver pals in a nearby restaurant and had been caught unprepared by the storm. Lacking both umbrella and raincoat, and with rainwater steadily pooling in the streets, he had been forced to slog through knee-deep water and pouring rain to get to the shuttle. An excitable fellow on a normal day, the events of the afternoon were too much for him to handle; he kept up a steady stream of commentary and criticism on other vehicles and pedestrians we passed as we slowly navigated through the flooded streets.
It was truly an amazing scene. Traffic normally ebbs and flows on the ring roads between Fengtai district, where my office is located, and Chaoyang district, where I live; the commute averages between an hour and an hour and fifteen minutes, which
is fairly common for a city the size of Beijing. However, on this particular night, traffic was at a dead stop from the very beginning of our journey. The driver switched on the traffic report; after countless i-reporters called in to confirm that nothing was moving anywhere in the city, the reporters seemed to give up on naming specific streets that were jammed and instead began soliciting callers to describe the scenes unfolding outside their car windows as they waited.
After about an hour and a half in traffic (during which time we moved about 10 kilometers), I began to see a curious sight: pedestrians holding umbrellas aloft were walking along the side of the road in droves. It seemed that they had given up on public transportation and had elected to walk home instead. Normally, this would be a rather dangerous undertaking, but the traffic was literally paralyzed. As I was pondering their ambitious undertaking, the driver turned the radio up louder. The newest reports coming in confirmed that several subway lines had stopped running. So much rain had fallen in such a brief period that the underground pumps couldn’t keep up with the rate of water flow
and water was flowing down the steps into the subways at several stops on different lines. Another report revealed that traffic was backed up in another area of the city because the water was so deep that the cars of some unlucky commuters were completely submerged in water and no one else could get through. I couldn’t believe it. Beijing routinely gets wild thunderstorms during the June to August period, but I had never seen or experienced a flash flood in the city before. Beijing is essentially a desert; there is very little rainfall or other precipitation in the northeast of China. Obviously, the Beijing city planners didn’t factor an occasional rainstorm of this magnitude into their piping network blueprints.
Eventually, the city’s fire trucks were deployed to begin pumping water away from the most heavily flooded areas to allow traffic flow to resume. In the end, it took us about three hours to get home on a day that should have taken about 45 minutes. It just goes to show how important it is to stay flexible when living in the constantly changing landscape of China.
And perhaps to invest in a pair of galoshes.
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Bigbrother
Lee DaeHyung
Water bombs were dropped in Seoul, Korea.
Due to heavy rains in Seoul, some lower bridges in the Han river in Seoul were blocked to traffic. some subway stop were leaking. :):):) 88 Chinese travellers enjoying cruise in the Han river were isolated by floods of rain. fortunately, they are all rescued. according to news, they enjoyed a party in the restaurant on a cruise vessel, although it was heavy rain. I enjoyed watching rain drops with sitting on my chair in my room. I can feel the cool and fresh air. from some weeks before, koreans suffered drought and boiling hot. to korean, this water bombs is present of the nature.