Autumn does not arrive in Gozo the way it arrives in the brochures. Nobody here watches leaves falling or reaches for a coat in September. Our autumn arrives as a storm, at night and without warning. The sky turns the colour of wet slate and the valleys fill within an hour. Then the island finds out what it built over the summer. I therefore treat the first heavy rain as an audit rather than a season. It checks every drain, every road, every cable, and every promise, and it publishes its findings by morning.

The audit falls hardest on Gozo because Gozo receives more of the rain. When the storm of 27 September last year crossed the islands, Xewkija recorded 58.2 millimetres in a day. Xagħra took 32.8 millimetres and San Lawrenz 31, according to Malta International Airport's stations. Valletta, by contrast, recorded 17.4 millimetres and Msida 13.6. Across every station in the country, the average came to 9.3 millimetres. Gozo took between four and six times the national average from a single night. The geography explains the difference, but the geography has not changed for millennia. What changed is that the ministers responsible for the drains have held their decisions for decades.

Xlendi shows what the numbers mean on the ground. The village sits at the bottom of a funnel, where the Lunzjata valley drains into a narrow bay. In October 2021, one night of rain swept tons of debris down the approach road. The torrent carried four cars into the sea. Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri visited the site and thanked the Blue Waters divers who lifted them out. In November 2022, the same road turned into a brown river and carried away parked cars again. Last September, three days before the Xewkija deluge, flash floods hit Xlendi once more. Three floods in four years at the same spot resulted in identical photographs and the same ministerial visit. Nobody announced a drainage scheme after any of them. A ministerial visit, whatever its sincerity, is not a culvert.

I wrote about Marsalforn recently and I will not repeat the entire case here. One line of that case belongs in this audit. The breakwater that once protected the bay collapsed in sections in 2005 and again in 2009. Every Gozo minister since has promised its replacement, and every autumn since has flooded the seafront. Justyne Caruana called it an electoral pledge in 2019, and the seafront flooded that same week. Storm Harry in January threw chairs and debris across the promenade while waves crashed onto the street. The rain and the sea attack Marsalforn from both ends, and the valley delivers the mud in between. The village has waited seventeen autumns for a structure that exists only in empty promises.

Malta solved its own version of this problem eleven years ago. The National Flood Relief Project dug ten kilometres of tunnels under Birkirkara, Msida, Gżira, Qormi, and Marsaskala. It served nine of the worst-hit localities in the country. Out of the €54 million bill, the European Union paid €43.9 million. The engineers finished the work in 2015, and businesses returned to Qormi and Valley Road in Birkirkara. The system handles a storm of the kind that returns every five years. Not one metre of that tunnel runs under Gozo. Not one of the nine localities lies north of the channel. The project was based on a Stormwater Master Plan focused on four catchments, each in Malta. Every plan since has kept the same map. Neither the planners included Xlendi nor Marsalforn on any priority list, although both flooded more often than Msida.

The grid enters this audit because of what happened on 28 August. That evening, two of the three cables feeding Gozo failed in the heat, melting in Xewkija and in Comino. One of the island's two distribution centres failed with them, and parts of Gozo sat in the dark for six hours others for more. Enemalta fixed the supply temporarily and has shared no update about a permanent fix since. The company's own engineers explained in 2017 why they buried the Mellieħa lines underground. Overhead cables, Enemalta wrote at the time, suffer storm damage every winter. A network that failed in heat now faces its first rain. Nobody has told Gozitans whether the repair will hold. Water and electricity share the same culverts and the same trenches beneath our roads. The first flood will find any joint the August repairs left weak.

Older Gozitans still call one storm the 'maltempata li ħadet lill-Menuna' (the storm that carried away Il-Menuna). In August 1964, a storm swept vans and motorcycles out of Marsalforn and boats off the slipway at Xlendi. The authorities closed the roads to both resorts because the rain had torn them apart. Sixty-two years later, the same two villages still flood first and still wait longest for protection. The 1964 storm surprised an island with no infrastructure. The next one will hit an island that chose not to build any.

This does not require a new study or further consultation. The Energy and Water Agency published its second Flood Risk Management Plan in 2023. It counts thirty-one dams across Malta and Gozo, holding 154,000 cubic metres between them. Surveyors map the valleys, the airport checks rainfall, and residents take photos of problem spots each autumn. What Gozo lacks is not information but a decision to allocate money to drains to minimise floods recurring. A breakwater tender, a culvert programme for Xlendi and a repair schedule for the feeders do not cost a fortune. Together they cost less than a single year of flood damage. They also cost less than the budget photographs the Ministry will issue in October.

Watch the sky in the coming weeks, and watch the announcements that follow the first storm. The rain will tell us which roads the contractor finished and which ones he only surfaced. It will tell us whether the August cables hold, and whether the Xlendi road survives another heavy rainfall. Then the audit will publish its report, in photographs, on the same morning as every previous year. The one question left is whether anyone in Victoria or Valletta will read it before the next one.