Word: petra
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hard at work on a peculiar problem: how to keep tourists from drowning in the desert. Such startling accidents actually do occur. Last spring, when a flash flood from a rare rainstorm roared down the Siq, a vertical-walled cleft that leads to the famous dead city of Petra, a group of French travelers was trapped, and only two out of 26 survived. Jordanian authorities are anxious to keep the tourists coming, though, and the ancient Siq, reputedly opened by Moses with the flick of a magic rod, is the most dramatic approach to Petra. It would scarcely have seemed...
Archaeologists came to the rescue. They pointed out that the Nabataeans, who ruled Petra long before the Christian era, were the best hydraulic engineers of antiquity. They, too, suffered from floods racing down the Siq, and they solved the problem in a manner on which modern engineers can hardly improve. In the upper part of the Siq, before it reaches the city, they built a stone dam 45 ft. high and 140 ft. long. The dam was not designed to hold an entire flood, only to check its water and divert it into a system of guide walls...
Desert Sprinkle. Two parties of foreigners reached the entrance to the Siq one day last week, eager to journey the remaining three miles to Petra. The first was a group of 23 Frenchwomen making a Holy Land pilgrimage under the tutelage of a Parisian priest, Abbé Jean Steinmann, 52, vicar of Notre Dame:* the second was a larger group of Italian pilgrims. The French party gaily entered the Siq gorge just as a sprinkle of rain began to fall. Four were traveling in a Land-Rover, the rest on foot...
Suddenly, the light rain became a cloudburst-the worst in arid Petra's recorded history. Within half an hour, torrential floods were streaming down from the hills and cliffs and pouring into the Siq as into a funnel. One Italian pilgrim said, "We heard shrieks and cries within the ravine, as the muddy cascade of water rushed by us. We saw the little car with the four women and the driver swept along by the torrent and then submerged. In an instant, they all disappeared in the floodwaters raging along at perhaps 60 miles an hour...
...thundering water. We clung to the ledge and prayed.'' Those two were saved, but when the flood subsided three hours later, the muddy floor of the gorge was littered with sodden, battered bodies-Abbé Steinmann, two Arabs (a guide and a driver), and 21 Frenchwomen. Petra police flashed word of the disaster to Amman and, dropping everything, King Hussein flew his helicopter to the Siq gorge and personally directed operations. The two survivors were rushed to comfortable quarters in Hussein's Basman Palace. The 22 others, who never quite reached the rose-red tombs of Petra...