16 APRIL 2024
The rain that broke the record.
More than 250mm fell in twenty four hours. In parts of the country that is more than a normal year, arriving between one morning and the next. Roads went under. Flights stopped. Dubai stopped.
Our unit sat in an industrial building on the edge of the city. Nothing about that day was specific to us. We were one address among thousands, and for a short while it looked like we had been lucky.
THE PART NOBODY EXPECTS
No water ever came inside.
That is the strange part, and it is the part worth understanding. The water never reached our stock. It went underneath the building instead, and took the ground with it.
Without stable ground the floor subsided. It dropped away from the wall, the wall cracked, and the structure stopped being safe to stand in. We photographed a tape measure held against the gap, because nobody believes you otherwise.
The pieces were fine. The building was not.
LOCKED OUT
We could not go back in.
Everything we owned was inside. Lasers, cabinets, stock, the drawings. None of it damaged and all of it unreachable, because you are not allowed to walk into a building that is still settling, and you should not want to.
THE PAPERWORK
Getting back in took lawyers before it took builders.
Responsibility for a subsiding building is not a quick conversation. That is as much as we will say about it, other than that it is the single biggest reason this took a year rather than a season.
THE REPAIRS
Then it took builders.
The structure had to be made sound before a single machine could come out of it. Construction runs to its own calendar and ours was not on it. We spent that stretch answering emails we could not act on, and drawing cities we could not cut.
THE MOVE
Twenty seconds of a business on a lorry.
When we were finally allowed back in, everything came out in one go. Pallets, cabinets, a flatbed backed up to the roller shutter. We filmed it because it felt important, then could not watch it for a long time afterwards.
The new place was an empty white room on the other side of Dubai. The lasers sat under plastic sheeting for weeks while the ceiling went in above them.
THE SLOW PART
Reopening takes longer than anyone warns you.
A room is not a studio. Power, extraction, benches, calibration, and every machine levelled again on a floor it had never met. Then the harder part, which was asking people who had sensibly found other work whether they wanted to come back.
We are a family business and we have never taken outside money. Everything here was paid for by the last thing we sold, which is a perfectly good way to run a company right up until the year you cannot sell anything. That is the honest reason the rebuild took two years and not one.