GET READY! - IT’S COMING!

This time it was chillingly WHITE. The population of Jerusalem and surrounding areas braced themselves for the arrival of an unforgiving blanket of SNOW.

Last year we were totally unprepared - many of us suffered electricity cuts and worse. Our cousins flew in from abroad in the middle of last year’s snow storm.  They managed to get a taxi at Ben Gurion which took seven hours to drive towards Jerusalem, but then when the driver was about 4 kilometers from the city he stopped and said he could go no further. It was now 4am. My cousins had to take their luggage and walk for two hours to try to get closer to Jerusalem and home. Needless to say they were traumatized.

This year however the papers have been full of the extra care that the authorities are taking.  So much so that on Wednesday morning, three days before even one flake of snow had fallen, the two main highways into Jerusalem were closed to traffic.

Residents were exhorted to take emergency measures. First: buy a shovel. Second: stockpile food and water supplies for at least three days. Third: because of expected strong winds we were urged to secure and tie down anything, or presumably anyone, that might take flight and injure passersby such as plant pots on balconies.

All educational establishments were closed - nursery schools, training colleges and universities. The Justice Ministry shut down the courts for the interim and there was little or no public transport. The place became a ghost town.

Drivers were requested politely not to abandon their cars on the Light Railway Line in the city.  City Pass, who runs the rail line, said that that there would be no services once the snow reached 5cms.  I imagined a small army of men with tape measures at the ready trying to determine when that level was reached.

City Pass said that the rail service would only be resumed once the offending 5cms was removed. But no one needed to worry, customers were reassured that all conductors would be specially trained to evacuate the passengers from the carriages under such circumstances.

But it was not all gloom and doom. One enterprising hotel in the city offered accommodation for three nights “ A first of its kind initiative’ - come and experience the snow first hand, and if there is no snow there is no charge." I would like to know what their criteria were for ‘snow’.  Mostly what we saw was grey, wet slush, with perhaps a dusting of grey/white on some roof tiles.  Did that constitute snow - and would I have had to pay the room charge on that basis? 

I would have felt very cheated if I had been offered anything less than half a meter of the sparkly white stuff, the sun shining, snowmen and snowballs at the ready.

So this year we saw the local authority taking measures to ensure that there was no repetition of what happened last year.  The only difference this year is that in spite of all the predictions there was virtually no snow on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday - it only started to fall on l and then had cleared completely by noon the next day. This was a great disappointment for all the children of the city, but one thing they can take satisfaction in was the storms that we heard.  I have never before experienced snow falling at the same time as massive thunder and lightning.  It could only be described as being of truly biblical proportions, which I guess is a suitable description for something that happens in our city.