When it rains ...... it Pours

Southern Afghanistan is predominantly a series of rocky, jagged mountains plopped in the middle of barren desert floor. Range after range these mountains and desert floors on and on in succession. The soil is such that it barely absorbs water if at all. When it does rain, it has to run off - and these rocky mountain tops run water straight down the wadi's onto the open desert floor. Just so happens, that one of these drainages runs right through Kandahar Airport. Consequently - it runs right through the airbase that surrounds the airport.

Sunday evening in Kandahar it started raining, and throughout the evening it got progressively harder - to include lightning and thunder. It was a muddy mess when I went to bed that night around midnight. I was fast asleep when the phone rang at 1am. It was one of our staff calling to tell me that a flood had begun running through our camp and our administration building (2 months old) was inundated with water on the ground floor. I turned on the lights, got my clothes on and headed out into the rain to see for myself.

I was absolutely stunned to find a literal river running in between our billeting area and the administration building. It was obvious the water was up against the building - and looking into the night - I could see that the current actually hit straight into the back of the building and wrapped around both sides - clearly entering the outside doors on both the North and South sides of the building. So I stepped headlong into the torrent and waded across the newly formed river. At it's deepest part it it was about 2 and a half feet deep as I walked through it to the building. I went up the outside stairs so as to not open the outside door, to find several people inside saying the downstairs was flooding.

Sure enough, as I descended the stairs, water was rushing under the doors, around the doors, under the aluminum siding of the building, and in some cases, bubbling up through the concrete floor. It continued to rain - the water continued to rise, and by 3am, containers in the yard adjacent to our camp were floating down the road. Two of the billeting blocks on the back side of our camp were also under water, so I spent a half hour knocking on doors, waking people up to ge them to unplug their electric cords, etc. until we could get the power turned off.

We resolved that there was no way to stop the water coming in the main building, but if we could keep it from getting deeper than the base boards or kicker boards in the building, we might save the dry wall. We discovered that the 3rd entrance on the ground floor - on the west side of the building was about 1/2 inch higher than the waterline on this back side of the building, so we opened that door, and began trying to create a current to move the water out of the building. All night long we did this. A security officer, myself, a Bosnian named Jisenko - who will do anything for you, and a few volunteers - who were flooded out of their rooms.

We were armed with 2 push brooms. Not much to battle mother nature with - until - Jisenko decided we could use the metal doors off of storage cabinets as giant squeegee's. With no sleep to speak of, and utterly exhausted - by 3am we were bending over and using these metal doors to push the water out of the building.

One of our happy group was getting regular Super Bowl updates as we worked through the night. By 6am the water had begun to recede, and we were finally able to open all the doors and begin pushing water out in all directions. By the time the rest of the camp was up and awake, we were well into "recovery" phase, having kep the water from rising above the baseboards. We were beat. I made it to my room at about 9:30 in the morning, and utterly crashed into my rack for a few hours of sleep - and by the time I got back to the building a little after noon, it didn't look half bad in there.

After the Rockets, and floods - I'm afraid to ask what next.......locusts maybe?