Gloop 2 - The Dust Rides Out

Sawdust (Photo credit: ganatronic)

It's still there, the fine dust suspended in the air. It's worse over in Fujairah, apparently, where visibility is own to 500 metres and flights from the emirate's tiny airport have been disrupted.

You know those boards you get in hotels that look a little like a washboard, with the rows of felt runnels accepting letters pushed into them for events and the like? We were delighted when we dropped into Fujairah airport for a 'nose' to find those boards being used for arrivals and departures. That's how small Fujairah airport is.

It's all very Mission Impossible Four, isn't it? Which reminded me this morning of the pal who worked on the set of the film - the sandstorm scenes were made possible thanks to two metre high fans and a whole load of specially imported Hollywood sawdust.

Yes, sawdust. Sand doesn't show up on film cameras (neither does 'real' rain, BTW, they have to use rain machines to make super-heavy rain) so a very fine sawdust is used instead. They had to fit AC filters to the car radiators to stop them 'brewing up' because they quickly became clogged in sawdust.

To tell you the truth, I'd be happier with sawdust. This fine stuff is getting  everywhere and I've got a tickly throat. Hundreds are apparently presenting themselves at various hospitals around the country with respiratory problems.

Gloop

It's everywhere. A thin layer of incredibly fine dust has coated any exterior surface. The car was a light grey colour this morning and we drove out into a strange otherworld, the tiny particles so small they're suspended in the atmosphere like a mist.

People scurry past, handkerchiefs held up to their faces, eyes squinting. The ghostly atmosphere bears down on you, the dusty gloop everywhere. As drive inland it gets worse, the blanket denser. Everything's greyed out.

Apparently the gloop is sand from Saudi Arabia, blown here by the seasonal weather patterns, highs and lows conspiring to whip the sands of the huge desertscape high into the air, the finest particles scattered in a corona across the Northern Gulf.

We've had the damndest weather this year, high winds a couple of weeks ago followed by a warm snap that saw temperatures hitting a most unseasonal 35 Celsius, giving way to high winds last night and now waking up to this soupy atmosphere clogged with powdery sand particles in suspension.

Can't wait for the frogs and locusts...

Dust

Marjorie Dawes would be happy with life in Dubai right now. There's quite a lot of dust about.

It's everywhere, a miasma of fine, irritating powder suspended in the air and reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. I'm constantly clearing my throat, my hair feels like chicken wire and the car is downstairs having a fine layer of abrasive sand ground into its paintwork by the watchman, who is a closet Green and believes in using minimal water to wash a car.

In case you're interested, it's been blown down the Gulf from Iraq, this dust. It's well-travelled dust, liberated dust. This is one of a number of stunning images of the storm from NASA's earth observatory.


It's brought the summer temperatures down by about 15-20 degrees, but we're living in a gloomy, overcast world that will have asthmatics grasping for the Ventolin. We had this last year, too, but nowhere near as bad. Usually, you get dust here when the 'Shamal' blows, the North wind. But this is no shamal, it's just a suspension.

I've never seen this before in 20 years of travelling around and living in this place. I don't know if anyone else remembers it.

Next thing we're all going to find out that it's rich in depleted uranium from US munitions deployed in Iraq. I know that's seeing the hole not the doughnut, but this is just the weather for that kind of thing, oppressive and gloomy.

Blogging about the weather... How low have I sunk, hmm?

Scoundrel

A second weather post in a week! What a scoundrel!

I'm a sucker for reminiscences about the Middle East - there are some great stories told by the people that were here throughout the breakneck and often scary period of change that has transformed this part of the world over the past century.

Some of my favourite pieces of recent history come from the people that have lived and worked in the Gulf over the past 30 years or so - not just expatriates, either - although expat rememberences appear to be easier to access. BTW, Khalid Kanoo's book about his own life in Bahrain is a fascinating read.

So I really enjoyed this piece in The National by Clive Stevens (I'd have missed it but for a link left on a comment to my recent weather-man spanking weather post: commenter The Wiley Weatherman claims Clive's the nicest man in aviation, and let us grant that, but I still think they goofed the forecasts over this week.), a forecaster at the Dubai Met Office, which talks about the wacky weather he's seen over the years. Clive's short memoir is well worth a read.

In case you're interested in these kinds of things, I do heartily recommend a visit to Len Chapman's excellent Dubai as it used to be site, which has lovingly archived rememberences, images and other paraphenalia gathered from the many people who have lived and worked here over the years.

And finally, just to finish off my most rambling and shambolic ever post (cue for some bright spark to try and find a worse one, but you won't), here's a link to an amazing picture, the image of the week for me. Sure the lightning piccies in Gulf News (down to 450g today, BTW) are pretty enough, but Catalin Marin's stormy HDR Burj Al Arab image is a stunner. It's here over at Momentary Awe.

Where in the World is the Weather?

Yeah, I know. Blogging about the weather is as low as you can go. Bite me.

Forecasters told us that Dubai would be foggy yesterday morning (UK Met Office) followed by showers yesterday afternoon and evening. And then the real bad weather would kick in - thundery stormy things through to the weekend.

The radio news has been telling us for the past two days that massive enormous huge black gnarly snarly storms would envelop the UAE from yesterday and that we'd better start building arks if we knew what was good for us.

Dubai Eye Radio's delightful @Kimboid was heard this very morning prophesying doom, gloom and weather fronts that'd have you reaching for your galoshes like a passenger on the Titanic hearing a shout of 'Ice!'. 92 FM's Catboy has been more like Chicken Licken Boy, Tweeting of imminent weather that'd make A Perfect Storm look like Picnic on Hanging Rock.

It's 9.15am and it is sunny. The sky is blue. The birds, I swear, are singing.

Sack the weathermen, I say. Sack 'em all. Their job is easy - 363 days a year, 'tomorrow will be sunny and fine in Dubai'. 2 days a year 'a risk of some light showers'.

Snow!

No words.

Amazing pictures in both the Gulf News (800g) and The National. Apparently only the second time this has happened in recorded history!

Ainsworth 1 Sky News 0 - They're Still Getting the Tone Wrong!

Following my wee rant about Sky News and how I think they’re getting the tone of their reporting on the floods in the UK wrong, I was delighted to watch Sky’s Jeremy Thompson interviewing Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Ainsworth last night. Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m no Tory. But long-time anchor figure Bowen started to rag Ainsworth about David ‘I wash regularly, actually’ Cameron going to Africa while his constituency was underwater. And that brought Ainsworth out of his corner fighting like Tyson on crack cocaine. Ainsworth slammed Thompson for Sky’s ‘blame game’ reporting, pointed out that we all had more important things to worry about and that the community was getting itself together and didn’t need Sky carping and pointing fingers right now thank you very much.

Thompson (whom I respect, incidentally) took a huge whack to the chin. And there I was cheering a spokesperson on again…

Meanwhile, talking about the weather, as the deliciously eccentric Alison Goldfrapp tells us: “It’s a strange day, no colours no shapes”. Today we woke up to the washed out colours of a summer Shamal, everything around rendered indistinct by the whirling sand, the air thick with the fine, pale dust. It gets up your nose, in your ears, in your hair, dries your skin and enervates your spirit.

The Mistral, the Khamsin, the Scirocco – the great seasonal winds of the world. And all we get is the miserable old Shamal.

The UAE’s Shamal whips up the desert and dumps it on the cities: sand streams across the roads and visibility drops, sometimes alarmingly. Shamal is Arabic for North and, perhaps interestingly, many people in the Arab World use shamal to mean left as well as yassar (right is yemin). Quite why North is synonymous with left is a mystery to me...

The beating hot wind, stinging with sand particles, is just what you need to add to that cheery summer feeling. Mind you, it could be worse. We could be 30 feet under in water.

Which is as neat a link as you’re ever going to get on this blog.

UK Flooding: The Spokesperson Bites Back

The recent massive flooding in the UK has been interesting for me, particularly because I’ve been able to sit here in the sweltering heat and watch how it’s been handled from a huge distance. And I have to say that the interview I watched recently between Sky News’ anchor and a complete unknown called Graham Bowskill had me cheering.

I spend quite a lot of my professional life coaching spokespeople who will be dealing with media. I spend a little bit of my time being a spokesperson talking to media, too. And so I guess, despite my pro-media approach to my work, I’m also inclined to ‘root’ for a spokesperson. Rarely have I found myself so involved in the moments of combat, because let’s face it this is a contact sport, as I was watching the Bowskill interview.

The story is simple: a huge volume of rain fell on areas in the UK again this week, forcing motorists to spend overnight in their cars on blocked motorways. Roads across the country were flooded and became impassable: whole communities have been flooded out with huge volumes of water - much of it now contaminated.

So when Sky News’ anchor starts to play the blame game and try to pin the misery of overnight stranded motorists and flooded homes on the Highways Agency, you’d expect spokesperson Graham Bowskill to stutter and witter, to try and defend his agency’s pathetic performance to the journalist who speaks for all of us.

Well, he didn’t. He spoke well, cogently and with dignity.

Now UK PR commentator The World’s Leading (Theo to his mates) has already made the point that spokespeople in the UK speak in a strange, strangled, doublespeak when they’re put on the spot. And Graham did that, for sure. But he also pointed out that his agency had issued major warnings to the media (and he didn’t say that the responsibility that the media bore was that of ensuring those warnings were taken as seriously as they were intended, but he might as well have, because the media does bear that responsibility) and that his agency had told people not to travel and his agency was trying to deal with a highly exceptional event. He went on to detail what the issues were and how his agency and its allied emergency services were reacting to meet the challenge – and he was doing that right up until the anchor, who had sensed she wasn’t going to win her moment of fame for nailing the twerp who was responsible for all our misery, cut him off while he was still trying to tell us how the services were dealing with the issue. She was wrong to have done so: and by God, I was (I swear, I was) on the edge of my chair cheering him on. Because a decent man, outlining a decent response - on all our behalves - to a totally unprecedented situation actually deserves our attention and our regard.

The fact is that Bowskill putting his strong case forward well actually played against everything that the journalist wanted – a cheap shot story angle that focused everyone’s rightful indignation and anger on the sucker being interviewed. And so he came through it all beautifully. It’s such a shame that nobody was there to point out how at odds with our common feeling at a time of crisis this style of ‘blame game’ journalism is. Because, of course, the media playing that game would never DREAM of facing public criticism that their response was inappropriate.

Several of Sky's interviews around the whole flooding disaster since have been in the same vein: alarmist and obviously ranging around and looking for someone they can pin blame on. Last night they cut an interview short with a chap who was telling them that the community had actually given up worrying and was taking it all lightly. Again, it's not what they wanted to hear and so they moved on and cut the interview.

And I do find it interesting that, as communities pull together in the face of this unprecedented disaster, Sky is just lobbing stones, being alarmist and generally plain unhelpful. It does seem to me that their tone of coverage is sharply at odds with public sentiment. I wonder if it will backfire on them...