Waterland Amman: City-Sized Pool
What, in Allah’s name, is the matter with the authorities in Amman? I ask you most humbly and with great shock that seems only to grow every passing day.
When did Amman turn into a giant swimming pool for cars? Why don’t the draining systems do what they’re supposed to do? Why do they function counter- purpose-wise and spit water instead of swallow it? Why doesn’t someone do something about this?
I am very outraged at the current state of Jordanian streets in general, and more so at the unbelievably mediocre state they assume when Allah decides to give us some water to drink. Every winter the same problem arises — it gets talked about on morning radio shows, evening news, and 60 minutes, those in positions of responsibility are brought to comment and they say next to nothing in citizen-O-meter, and then after the usual citizen rants nothing is done to remedy the situation on the ground. Nobody is charged with anything (ruining people’s cars, for instance) and nobody cares.
How very, utterly, desperately pathetic this situation is! I refuse to get my pants soaking wet up to my knees when I decide to cross the street, I refuse to get water up to my brain when I dive in a street pool, and I refuse to cramp someone’s style by spraying them with dirty wheel water when I pass them by. Moreover, I refuse to sheep-up about this.
Amman Municipality and everyone working in it — FIX OUR STREETS or by the devil, this time, someone will get hurt.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Related Posts
- Swimming in the Street
- Camels in the City
- Jordan: Dirty Water and Bottled Water
- Stop This Madness
- Alien Impact Poisons Canadian Town
January 21st, 2007 at 4:21 am
<p>"FIX OUR STREETS "</p>
<p></p>
<p>they will they will …. when you pay more taxes inshallah :)</p>
January 21st, 2007 at 7:19 am
Tololy, this may shock you, but the same thing happened every time it rained in San Diego, California. The truth is, here and there, it just doesn’t rain enough for the authorities to care enough to spend lots of money fixing the system.
January 21st, 2007 at 11:34 am
We get floods here in Southern California whenever there’s an unusually heavy rainfall, too. It’s incredibly dangerous, as well as annoying. I reacll once getting off the Freeway I hit a lake of watre at the bottom of the offramp while I was doing about 50 miles an hour. Nobody had even bothered to put out cones or warning signs. I guess it’s just too expensive to re-do the whole drainage system to handle rainstorms that only happen every year or two :(
January 21st, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Tololy, I invite you to visit Irbid, the situation there is ten times worse… no drainage system, there are no sewers neither manholes and the city is flat, imagine what occurs when it rains!
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:21 am
I’ve always found it fascinating when the holes in the manhole covers become little geysers during a small torrent of rain.<br /><br />I grew up in Southern California, and it’s not quite as bad (although I’ve never lived in San Diego). The sewage systems where I lived where extremely developed, although there is only so much it can handle. It really depends on the amount of rain at any given time.<br /><br />However, the rain that we had this past weekend was not <em>that</em> strong, so the system should have been able to adaquately handle the situation.<br /><br />And although the streets are in desperate need of attention, I’d blame the inadequate sewage system for the flooding.<br />
February 14th, 2008 at 9:34 am
[...] I had posted about this last year and I was thinking of posting about it again recently, because the situation in Amman in the winter is despicable. The streets are always flooded, the drainage holes are spitting water instead of taking it in, and driving is really dangerous especially because you can’t see the many bumps and holes in the streets under the water. [...]