Located less than five degrees north of the equator, brunei has a tropical climate. In other words, when it rains it pours. And then it floods!
The strip of land along the coast is relatively flat and only a few feet above sea level. There's a sea wall that was built to help prevent high tides from inundating kuala Belait. In my view, the wall hampered the flow of water behind it out to sea when it floods, prolonging the misery. As I recall, many of the roads had drainage ditches alongside them. The challenge when driving through a flood was staying on the road and out of the ditches.
In the shot below, a car drives down a flooded kuala Belait street at night. Given the length of the exposure, you can't actually see the car – just the glow of it's lights and the plumes of water on each side.
I was standing outside one of our workshops, a few streets away from the house I was dorming in. If you look in the foreground of the photo you can see grass from the side of the street pocking up through the surface of the water. Between that grass and the road surface was a small ditch, but not so small as you wouldn't damage your car if you drove into it.
I've other photos taken during the day that show maybe four inches of water on top of the road, and others of some of our techs walking in the flooded workshop which also had two or three inches of water on the ground floor.
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