A tremendous two-hour rainstorm early last month brought the incredible sight of fishing boats and cars being swept along the road between the harbour bridge and the Town Square while Symiots looked on helplessly as the resulting mountain floodwater poured down and swirled around in what was the worst inundation of water that the Island has suffered in forty years... 

Street-level houses and businesses were flooded out as the torrent rushed relentlessly downwards, and the water backed up to a depth of more than two feet.  By noon, the waters had started to recede, but there was still the mammoth task of clearing the stranded and damaged boats and cars, debris and inches-deep mud.

It was still raining as a bull-dozer and a fork-lift truck were drafted in , and it will be hard to forget the scenes as Mayor Miltiadis Sarris and a bare-foot police officer directed operations and got down to hands-on work alongside the dozens of helpers who arrived.   

Meanwhile, after the collapse of a nearby wall,

both the nursery and primary schools in Yialos were closed early and no child was allowed to leave until collected by its parents.

There was also some road damage in higher Chorio and the head of the Pedi Valley, and a section of the Pedi sea-front was completely closed off due to water-borne mud and debris.

Much of the mayhem was caught on camera by a Belgium television crew who were here on another story and some of their footage was shown on the 24-hour weather channel in the United States.
The first three miles of the Yialos-Panormitis

road were blocked by mud-slides, but in Panormitis itself the weather was not only dry, it was sunny - and on the next day when it was also sunny in Yialos, in came the cargo-boat Daphni carrying her usual tonnage of water.

Fortunately, in all this, no-one was injured.  Currently, there has been no financial estimate of the destruction  caused, but the resultant mopping-up operations , which continued for a couple of days afterwards, will no doubt have uncovered a fair amount of residual damage.