The man who clears the drains

When a heavy rain hits Jeddah, the stories afterwards are about the rescuers.

The young men who wade into a flooded street to push a stalled car to higher ground. The neighbour who carries a shopkeeper's stock up a staircase while the water climbs. Those stories deserve to be told, and the people in them deserve the thanks they get.

There is another person in the same street who never appears in the stories. He is the caretaker of one of the buildings, and every year before the season turns he goes up to the roof, clears the leaves and plastic out of the drains, and checks the channel at the kerb outside. It takes him a morning. Nobody watches him do it.

When the rain comes, his building does not flood. Neither does the shop below it, or the car parked outside. There is nothing to see, which is exactly why there is no story.

Rescue is visible, urgent and brave. Prevention is quiet, routine and slightly boring. We are wired to reward the first and forget the second, and that is a mistake in both directions.

Prevention is not less important. It is often more important, because of how it adds up. A rescuer helps the one person standing in front of him, once. A cleared drain helps everyone on that street, every time it rains, without anyone needing to be there.

The heroes save the evening. The caretaker saved a hundred evenings that nobody will ever know were in danger.