A little heavy-handed on the 'Rainmaker'!

Ooops!

Beijing is basically a desert. We go for months at a time with little or no rain at all. But when it does rain, especially during the summer months - oh boy, it comes down hard sometimes!

From about 4pm yesterday it rained here for around 12 hours, pretty much continuously, and often very heavily. The first hour or so was torrential, a full-on tropical downpour.

Beijing floods very easily, because there's no storm drain system to speak of (and what there is gets clogged with the ubiquitous builder's sand and bits of tree within a few minutes - really, minutes - of a heavy rain beginning). The city was brought to a standstill yesterday, just at the beginning of the evening rush hour: many of the downtown subway stations were inundated and had to be closed down for a while. Blogger BeijingDaze collated some of the alarming photos of the situation that were being posted to Chinese 'microblog' site Weibo.

A large part of the problem, I fear, is that the city authorities here are so desperate for rainfall that they never just allow nature to take its course. Whenever a cloud ventures anywhere near the capital, artillery units are dispatched to shoot it full of silver iodide (or whatever the cloud-seeding chemical of choice is these days; the Chinese have probably found something cheaper and more carcinogenic). Even when it's a cloud the size of Belgium, and so dense that it plunges us into pitch darkness in the middle of the afternoon.

If they'd just let this storm front pass over unmolested, I imagine it might have rained fitfully for a day and a half, with much of the rain falling around the periphery of Beijing, or further downwind in places like Tianjin. But the cloud-seeders shot the shit out of it, and it dumped all of its considerable contents on Beijing in the space of half a day - perhaps a third of it, I would guess, in the first hour. And look what happened.

The boys in charge of the Weather Machine got their knuckles severely rapped 18 months or so back, when they initiated a massive snowfall early in the season, without thinking to notify any of the other city authorities first. I suspect there will be similar chidings and recriminations this time.

What larks.