DWP - the record: prompt

The Record

For the entire month of September it rained, not continuous but the heavy downpour came at various times of the day, sometimes heavy, sometimes quite light, but rain it did. It was the record rainfall that the entire country had not expected and by the end of that month, the waters rose and flowed into the streets in every city.

It spared no one, not even the most powerful politicians, not even the most popular celebrities escaped it as streets turned into rivers and parks into lakes. A Mercedes Benz was treated the same way as a rusty rundown old car - carried by the strong current, turned over and left unusable. The only difference was that the owner of the Mercedes had insurance coverage and the rusty rundown car did not. Over and over, news showed pictures of the famous actress on the roof of her expensive home, devoid of makeup and the expensive clothes, wet from the pouring rain.

People tried to rescue whatever belongings they could - a woman held her family's clothes in a plastic basin on her head, as she walked the chest-high flood water; a child rode on the shoulders of an old man as he treaded along, looking for a place high enough for the child's safety; a policeman carried a dog and a cat while the owners chose to remain in their houses.

An old man refused to leave his home, telling everyone the water would soon recede. He knew these waters when they came and he knew they could only rise so high. But when the waters reached just below his shoulders, he was forcibly removed from his single-storey home by his neighbours and brought to someone's second floor home. A woman sat on her refrigerator to prevent it from being carried by the raging flood, a possession she knew she would never again have, as she held the statue of the Virgin Mary in her arms.

The pictures were devastating and heart rending, especially of a five-year old girl huddled on top of a shanty's roof illegally built underneath an overpass; of people who used the high voltage wires to traverse the streets - they figured since there is no power, the wires were safe. When one wants so desperately to survive, you hold on to anything, you count on anything.

And when the waters receded, the pictures of devastation, the chaos of retrieving one's possession from the knee-deep mire; the despair of people hugging their expensive sofas, crying over their damaged material possessions, feet buried in mud, faces buried in their hands, crying over their loss.

Those were but few of the images recorded caused by the record rainfall that caused the record flood that wreak havoc to the lives of so many people.

And then how soon they all forgot.