It was like Armageddon over here on Thursday and I've been dying to write about it but first I had to calm (and cool) the heck down.
To set the stage: last week was one of the hottest in history here. Sunday through Thursday, daily highs in Sharjah were 45-47C (113-116F). On Tuesday, Al Ain (90 minutes from us) was the hottest place in the world.
On Thursday at about 8am, a power substation serving our entire area of Sharjah caught fire. So the power went out. And as you know, around here, when the power goes out, the water does, too. We were lucky at first because our block is connected to a different grid (or connected to the same grid in a different way - I'm not sure), so we still had AC and water. I went into work as normal to finish up grading the final exams, but ended up doing so by emergency lighting in a deserted hallway before I gave up and went home.
The girls' school lost power, but was able to run on generators until just before dismissal. I am so glad they were able to be somewhere cool and safe while the power station fire still raged and campus was descending into administrative and literal chaos - it's finals week, and exams were being canceled, then frantically rescheduled to the one building that hadn't lost power, then canceled again as that building went dark, too. Facilities men were running all over the place, sweaty and unshowered faculty were showing up to dark offices and quiet copy rooms. Emails were flooding in from students wanting to know what was going on, until IT had to shut down the servers, rendering uni email and iLearn offline. It was madness.
Still, we were sitting cool and smug in our powered house - until about 2.30pm, when our power went out, too. It was fun and exciting for a few minutes - the girls and I were in the middle of making a snack involving melting chocolate chips, but since we couldn't use the microwave, we just put them in a tupperware outside. They melted in about 5 minutes (because 45C).
We decided to go to Dubai to wait out what we hoped was the worst - surely power would be restored by evening! At Mirdif City Centre, we saw several families from our area, doing the same thing - catching a bite to eat and soaking in the AC before heading back to uncertain conditions at home. Many people had already booked into hotels for the night (they were the smart ones, as it turned out). Jeremy and I were too optimistic.
Because when we got home in the early evening, the power was still out. Campus was a deserted, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Anyone who had anywhere to go, had gone there. And then there was us, sitting in the dark, half-heartedly lighting candles (well, the kids were doing it whole-heartedly), and lamely eating the rest of the snack the girls and I had made before it turned into mush in the increasing indoor heat. (An oddity of living in many hot places is that even when the outside temperature cools, the house continues to heat up - I don't know why this is, but it always seemed somehow that the heat stored itself in the walls and then released in the evening hours.) Jeremy called up a hotel close to our house to possibly book a room, but surprise, surprise, they were already full - with people from our area displaced by the power outage.
Fortunately, a neighbor a few blocks away randomly had power (I do not understand these things so I'm not sure how it could be, but it was). He invited us to stay in his spare room for the night. So we packed up and went over there. Around 9.30pm, Miriam and I ran back home and saw to our great, great joy and possibly almost tears of gratitude, that the power in our block was back on! Happy, happy day. It was such an eerie sight, though - we were the only ones who had stayed in our block, and so lights were blazing in everyone's houses but nobody was around.
Throughout all of this, our neighborhood's fb page had been going wild with reports on the latest outages - this block had power, then didn't, then did, etc. Most people were at hotels or relatives' or friends' hosues. We were dismayed late that night to see that some blocks were losing power again, so it was a fitful night of sleep. A friend of ours decided to forego the uncertainty and bought himself a generator. Jeremy said he would do the same if we weren't leaving in three weeks.
In the morning, we still had power and I was sure everyone else did, too. But a quick check of the fb page told me that some blocks were coming up on 26+ hours without power. In the end, power and water were only fully restored after 33 hours. We were so lucky to be spared most of that time, even if it was a stressful and bizarre afternoon/evening for us (I am convinced this will be Sterling's earliest memory - dancing around a lantern in the hot, dark, living room, then going to some guy's house and almost going to bed, then going back home and going to bed for real). Late on Friday afternoon, those neighbors who had stayed away the longest came straggling back to musty, warm homes and spoiled fridges and freezers. We all feel like we deserve survivors' t-shirts or something.
And I get that this was "only" a power outage, but a power/water outage becomes a big deal when it's so hot outside. AC is not a luxury here this time of year - it is essential. (I realize that people survived here before AC, but only small populations and they lived in homes equipped to harness natural methods of cooling, and we don't.)
Throughout this experience, I learned a few things:
1. Just because you are affiliated with a large-ish institution who provides you with work and housing, doesn't mean they will take care of you in an emergency. I already knew this on some level, but I think it's our tendency as human beings to hope/assume that someone bigger and better will be there to provide for you in an emergency. That was not the case, at all.
2. What we experienced for one day (and others for two days) is normal life for many people around the world - not many people in these kinds of temperatures, but still. My thoughts immediately went to people in Syria who cope with the heat and dark and uncertainty all the time, and worse. In fact, on one of the fb threads about this fiasco, a coworker shut us all up (but in a nice way) with his comment that he'd talked to his mother in Syria and she'd said now we all know what it feels like.
In some ways, I'm amazed that we lived here for five years without experiencing something like this before; apparently this is the worst power outage there's been in this area for 16+ years. It reminded me of how much we depend on AC in this place for most months of the year.
Things are limping back to normal now - final exams were rescheduled and I'm in my office this morning catching up on the things I was meant to do on Thursday. But it's cool and there's water, hooray!
