BillBullock

I must have met your mother 30 years' ago because that's how long I have been using it for mosquito bites. I could not have carried on gardening and painting this morning without Tiger Balm. As soon as you feel or see the little blighters, you dab it on and the pain dies down not long after.

liveaboard

Well here we are, it's September; but the TOURISTS ARE STILL HERE!

I don't understand.

macliam

The season has been lengthened - now March to November...... Hotel's are happy.

Artfuldodger128

Have you tried eating garlic, which I think is known to repel mosquitoes?

spouse of scouse

....and the person you sleep with

liveaboard

Long sleeves in the day, fan at night.
No worries now though; they've just announced a malaria vaccine.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to November.
The tourists will go home, the weather will cool down, and hopefully it will rain...

Sunseeker1st

Rain is coming Sunday night ... if we are lucky!

sportpix

Well, it rained in Lagos yesterday and the road down the hill from me turned into an absolute river! From my observation, having previously worked in highway construction, local drainage is something of an afterthought or even nonexistent. It’s probably just as well we don’t get the rainfall of places such as the UK. The drainage system we have simply wouldn’t be able to cope with it.

liveaboard

In our area (Aljezur) I've observed crews working on the drainage all year; private farms as well as public space.
The road edges are shoveled clear, ditches dug out, culverts cleaned.

We're ready to accept whatever rain we get; so far, there's only been a few mm.

macliam

Well the drainage system in the UK can't deal with it either - hence raw sewage being discharged into waterways and the sea.

However, even my desert of the Alentejo wasn't any drier than parts of the UK this Summer......

BillBullock

I am a retired Civil and Miltary Engineer. I used to teach the construction of roads and airfields in the Army. I would start my first lecture on road design by saying "There are two aspects to consider in the design of roads: (1) the design of the pavement (ie the road surface) and (2) the design of the drainage for the road". Drainage for roads starts with interception drainage to keep water away from the road but also includes the roadside drainage. Get either of these wrong and you are in trouble. Here in the Algarve it appears to me that they do not employ road engineers but things are not that impressive back in the UK where drainage problems are also prevalent. How much housing has been built in floodplains around the UK?

Moses2013

I thinks that's a common myth. The drainage system in many parts of Portugal needs to take far more as you have more heavy rainfall in a shorter period.
London has always been drier than Lisbon, even before climate change was mentioned and the rain in Edinburgh is nothing compared to Porto.

sportpix

Dranage systems are designed to meet the expected rainfall of the location. My wife is a Chartered Civil Engineer specialising in hydrology, so we have had endless conversations on this over the past 40 years. In Hong Kong we get between two and three metres of rainfall per year and the drainage is designed to meet one in 50, 100 or even 200 year storms, depending on the area in question. I remember one weekend in particular when we received one metre of rain. It’s rare but it happens. Lagos has an annual rainfall of less than 500mm so designing drainage to meet this is graduate engineer stuff.

Moses2013

As you say "designed". In Hong Kong you have expensive drainage tunnels and 7.4+ million people to pay for it. If the soil is so dry that it can't take the water it's always going to happen and there just isn't enough money to change that in Lagos.

https://www.scmp.com/video/hong-kong...weather-storms