Water, water everywhere...

Meteorologists attribute the watery devastation which has spread across parts of the southern hemisphere in recent weeks to the changed pattern of El Nina – the wicked ‘sister’ of El Nino, and both born of a clash of warm and cold currents in the Pacific – which has unleashed ferocious cloudbursts and flooding from Brazil to Brisbane. Mudslides have swept away entire towns to the north of Rio; cities in Sri Lanka  and Queensland have been inundated;  hundreds have died and tens of thousands have lost their homes.

So far – other than in isolated winter occurrences on a scale that is small by comparison with the havoc in the southern hemisphere – Europe has been spared the watery disasters. And though global warming is changing weather patterns world-wide and this winter has already created record-breaking Arctic conditions in much of north America and the higher European latitudes, traditionally the worst of winter is still to come.

Gibraltar has been fortunate. With our temperate Mediterranean climate, we experience none of the extremes which can strike even the north of Spain. Which is just as well ... because the Rock is totally unprepared for the cloudbursts which strike us sporadically each winter – let alone for the spate of floods experienced elsewhere in the world. Even moderately heavy rain turns Casemates into a giant water-logged puddle, where most pedestrians find it ‘drier’ to walk in the gutters than on the cobbles, while the appropriately named ‘Watergate’ entrance to the city runs inches-deep in water. Glacis Road and its surrounds become a succession of mini lakes which form water-splashes from which – whether deliberately or unintentionally – passing cars soak pedestrians using the pavement.

At such times many will remember the claim made by property-developer Greg Butcher in the early stages of the construction of Ocean Village that he had offered a deal to Government to improve this major access to the city, re-laying the pavements and eliminating the pot-holes... a responsibility which in reality has been that of the occupant of No 6 during his over-long tenure as Chief Minister.

The ‘new’ and expensively refurbished Casemates may look attractive to summer visitors, but in winter it is a drainage disaster; one of the few improvements for which the present Government has been responsible but which, each winter, rains prove to have been another of its failures. And, later this year, the electorate is likely to ask itself whether its money (i.e. the tax-payer’s) might not have been better spent on improving the city’s drainage than – among other things – on an airport that is neither necessary nor wanted.