It always has struck me as almost humorous, this concept of flooding in the desert. Shouldn’t they be mutually exclusive concepts? Even after decades in the parched interior of California, the notions of “bone dry” and “raging water” just don’t jibe.

Yet, here I am, in the middle of the night on Abu Dhabi Island, one of the drier spots on the planet … keeping an eye peeled on every nook of the Teeny Apartment to make sure not too much water pours into the interior.

Don’t want to sound cocky, but I don’t think we’re taking on any more water. But it continues to rain, so …

As desert-dwellers can tell you, if they remember the last time serious rain came down … the desert is a truly dangerous place for flooding.

When the ground is brick hard, dense as rock, unbroken by grass or bush or tree … it cannot absorb rain like, say, the deep heaths of Europe.

Not much precipitation is required in a few minutes from a passing thunderstorm to send cascades of water down a gulch,  sweeping all before it in a “what-the?” moment of extreme danger.

It poured rain in some parts of the UAE two nights ago,  causing power outages, drowned roads and four storm-related fatalities.

One woman died when an entrance near a building in Dubai, up the coast, collapsed.

Up in Sharjah, the next emirate north of Dubai, three guys died when they stood in water electrified by a live wire. They were electrocuted. One story was heavy with pathos. Four Asian men (which here,  as in England, means Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi unless otherwise noted), lived in the same room. The floor flooded. One of the guys stepped into the water and was electrocuted. Another guy saw his roommate in extremis,  and he stepped off his bed, into the water … and he was electrocuted, too. The last two men in the room figured out that discretion was their only option (forget about valor) … and stayed put on their beds till they could raise the police to rescue them.

It has been pouring rain for most of the past hour, here in Abu Dhabi City, and I am quite confident most of the villas here are leaking like Bugsy Siegel the night he got whacked.

Construction here often is shoddy, to put it politely. And then there is the brutal climate of overpowering heat and humidity, and I imagine even things put together with some care begin to crack or pull apart or rot out.

Anyway, this is … the fourth time this apartment has been flooded in the 10-plus weeks we have been here. Now, granted, it has been the “rainy” season — the three months when 99 percent of the year’s rain falls. All 3-4 inches of it.

But it was only this time round that I finally figured out where the water is coming in. I’m not the handiest guy in the world, or in this block, or in this building, but in my defense I had never actually been at home when the heavens opened.

We heard the lightning advance. Bang. Rumble. Bang. Rumble.  Baanng. Rummmble. About 15 minutes later, came the torrent.

I may have mentioned before that this old (maybe 30 years?) building is designed quite curiously. And one of those curiosities is that someone actually planned for the runoff of the two stories above this ground floor … to land in the little patio just outside my front door.

I always thought that was the major problem. Too much water in the patio.

However, we have discovered the real culprit: Near nonexistent sealing in the window sills of the two main windows, one between the living room and the patio, the other between the bedroom and the patio.

Within minutes of the rain commencing,  water was pooling in both the living room and bedroom. The former is a bigger issue than the later because the living room has the laptops and the power strip we use for several machines in this room. If the water got in there … well, we could end up like those poor guys in Sharjah. Oh, and the room also has a rug. Can’t have that messed up.

But studying this a bit more closely I realized that … the water was striking the fixed portion of the window (there was wind involved) … and collecting in the runway, at the bottom of the sill, through which the movable half of the window travels.

Once collected, it spilled back into the inside half of the runner … and also leaked through the sill itself … running down the dry wall and onto the stone floor.

So, what to do?

First,  the towels came out, to sop up the puddles rapidly forming. I then looked for tape to cover an outlet that had water running over it (not finding any) … and then came our salvation, so far.

Paper towels, wadded up into dense pulp and jammed into the runners behind the stationary half of the window. To keep the water from getting into the inside half of the runners and draining down onto the floor.

Did that with both windows.

For extra effect, we got a couple of hand towels and jammed them into the outside half of the runners (during a break in the rain) … to try to limit the water getting into the system in the first place.

For now, it is holding. (And, yes, I think of scenes from naval movies, from submarines or other vessels, where valves are screwed shut, or doors sealed, and pumps are going for all their worth.) I even had time to wring out four towels. over the sink, and return them to the battle lines.

The rain let up at 2:30. It resumed at 2:40. It is calming down again, here.

It could go on like this for hours.  But I wonder.  This is the desert, and if it got storms that dumped multiple inches of rain … well, it wouldn’t be the desert, would it. I assume the town gets 3-4 episodes of rain per year, and it comes down hard and fast for a half hour here, a half hour there, and then the little cell passes on, and it’s over. Often over till next year.

That’s my hope. We’ve had enough rain, for now. The scrub and the hardy lawns have been well-watered. The fine dirt and grit from previous duststorms has been tamped down. It can stop now.

My plugs are holding. But I don’t quite trust my ability to keep it out, nor this leaky old building’s capacity for giving me any help. I know that within 100 yards of me some serious damage has been done. This is an old neighborhood.

Yes. Floods. In the desert. Nothing is water-tight and on nights like this, we are reminded of it.