Blowing dust up our ass

So, interesting weekend, when an email appeared forecasting high winds (force 10) and raging seas for Dubai last Friday the Weasel pretty much wrote it off, mainly because almost immediately Gulf news and the Toady published denials.

Yet because of his aviation background the Weasel was still being phoned by friends on Thursday asking if he had heard the news that there was a huge storm coming. All a bit of fun surely and very typical of Dubai.

Slight problem for some though in that building site insurers now put pressure on contractors to stop work (though to be fair not many work on Fridays) and to ensure all equipment and scaffold etc was secured, expensive.

So it was with a certain superiority that the Weasel stumbled to bed on Thursday chuckling at the naivete of Dubai folk - only to wake up the next day to find that the world has disappeared in a haze reminiscent of The Fog. No wind but pretty poor visibility and choking dust.

Since moving to the Empty quarter the Weasel has been subjected to some pretty extreme sand storms but none quite as invasive as this one, the bloody dust is everywhere, in the nose in the eyes, even jamming this keyboard.
The sickness rate at the Weasel workplace has rocketed by 100% (from 1 to 2) but the coughing, sneezing and streaming eyes throughout cubicle land was real enough .

So clearly there was perhaps a grain of truth in the original report, they just got the wind direction wrong by 180 degrees and exaggerated the speed by 5 or 6 times.

The intriguing thing is the warning came out so early, (Monday or Tuesday) that it probably originated from a pretty good forecasting source. The version of the mail the Weasel saw puported to come from the UAE met office and he does wonder if that could have been the origin, sent as a mail to a mate that then got blown out of all proportion (poor pun intended).

Rumour? Gossip? Little basis in fact? Sure, but according to seven days that's nothing new here.