The Tribune

IT was Friday, the 13th.

We should have guessed there would be something memorable about it, even though that date has always been lucky for my husband who, in his younger days, made the biggest sale of his career on a Friday the 13th.

Everything seemed fairly normal as the day wore on. Another work week behind us, a houseguest departing about sunset, heading to the airport to board a British Airways flight to London, no inkling of what was to come. We turned the lights out shortly before 9 and headed to bed to watch a little TV.

And the heavens opened.

Like a woman scorned or a groom left standing at the altar dumped by the woman of his dreams, the skies got angry and then exploded with rage. They wept and wept and wept some more. For five hours, they wept so much until you’d have thought there just weren’t any more sky tears left. According to meteorologist Wayne Neeley, the Met Office recorded 12.37 inches of rain at LPIA in five hours, as much rainfall, Neeley said, as you would expect in a Category 1 to 3 hurricane.

As for our houseguest, like other passengers on the full BA flight, he strapped in and was prepared for take-off before being advised that the plane was not going anywhere until the storm passed and there they sat, a cylinder of metal with wings on the outside and frustration on the inside for the next five hours as rain pounded and lightning sizzled and thunder boomed.

At an older hotel in Cable Beach, water swept through the door, a woman slipped and fell and had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. At a newer hotel, the ground floor flooded. Elsewhere on Cable Beach, a family’s fenced in back yard became a bay, playing host to a school of gray snapper.

Blake Road, Windsor Field Road, low-lying land east of the Town Centre at Old Fort Bay looked like a river. Across the way in front of Charlottesville, rains pushed piles of debris making a temporary and unwanted statement. In South Beach, a family scrambled, searching for the highest rubber boots they had, the ones they store in case of bad storms. They live in a low-lying area.

Throughout much of the western half of New Providence, offices and stores flooded. Downtown Nassau was awash.

It was only a rain storm, a night of rain that should have been a wake-up call about the stark reality of low-lying coastal property, a reminder of why our ancestors clung to hilltop land and prisoners on some islands of the Caribbean were relegated to serving time on the beachfront with no one worrying about a jail. It was only a night of the greatest downpour in recent memory, a night worthy of a note to self about the importance of saving for storm-rated windows or getting that roof repaired, another note to self, hey, climate change is real and it makes for stronger, more intense storms with less notice.

It was only a delay for a flight to the UK that arrived five hours late, but in retrospect, it was a lot more than a night of heavy rain. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Then again, it was Friday the 13th.

And five days later, some streets were still streets near the airport were still awash.