A powerful out-of-season storm swept through Alexandria, Egypt on Saturday, creating widespread flooding and property damage in what local media are calling an extraordinary weather event for this time of year.
The Mediterranean coastal city experienced intense overnight rainfall accompanied by hail, strong winds, and dramatic lightning displays. Social media footage captured the severity of the conditions, showing ice pellets being driven through café windows by fierce gusts, prompting patrons to evacuate establishments hastily. The storm’s intensity left major roadways underwater and completely flooded several underpasses throughout the city.
Governor Ahmed Khaled Hassan responded by elevating the city’s emergency status, mobilizing response teams who spent Saturday morning conducting vehicle rescues and clearing storm debris from affected areas. Fortunately, Egypt’s health ministry confirmed no injuries or fatalities resulted from the severe weather.
While winter storms regularly impact Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline, spring weather events of this magnitude are highly unusual. Local meteorologists and media characterized Saturday’s storm as having no recent precedent for the season.
The incident highlights growing concerns about climate-related weather extremes in the region. Climate researchers emphasize that global warming is intensifying weather volatility, creating conditions that generate both severe droughts and unpredictable, intense precipitation events.
Alexandria faces particular vulnerability to climate change impacts. The historic city regularly contends with coastal erosion, sea level rise, and seasonal storm flooding. According to projections from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Mediterranean sea levels could increase by as much as one meter over the next thirty years.
Even more conservative estimates suggest serious consequences for the city. A half-meter sea level rise by 2050 would inundate approximately 30 percent of Alexandria’s area, potentially displacing 1.5 million of the city’s six million inhabitants and eliminating nearly 200,000 jobs from the local economy.
In response to these mounting threats, city officials have initiated protective infrastructure projects, including the construction of an extensive coastal breakwater system designed to shield the city from future storm surges and rising waters.
Jewish sources predict that all of the plagues will reappear in the final Redemption, but in even more powerful forms. It is written in Midrash Tanchuma, homiletic teachings collected around the fifth century, that “just as God struck the Egyptians with 10 plagues, so too He will strike the enemies of the Jewish people at the time of the Redemption.”
This concept was explained by Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, a 13th-century Spanish commentator, who wrote, “In Egypt, God used only part of His strength. When the final redemption comes, God will show much, much more of His power.”
The Israel Bible gives a poignant explanation of why the seventh plague, a combination of fire and ice, is appropriate for the turbulent times we live in.
“The hail contains both fire and ice, yet the fire does not melt the ice and the water of the ice does not extinguish the fire. They are able to exist in harmony for the purpose of fulfilling God’s will. Similarly, the medieval commentator Rashi comments (Gen. 1:8) that the Hebrew word for heaven, ‘shamayim,’ comes from the Hebrew words ‘aish’ (fire) and ‘mayim’ (water), as the two came together in harmony to make up the heavens. This serves as a powerful lesson of peace and is referenced in the daily Jewish prayer service. The following supplication appears multiple times in the liturgy: ‘He Who makes peace in His heights (between fire and water), may He make peace, upon us and upon all Israel.’”
