One of the ways that people protest here is by setting up a blockade of tires across a highway or other heavily traveled road and then dousing them with lighter fluid and setting them on fire. We’ve seen plumes of dark smoke and heard about the chaos they caused, but hadn’t come across them ourselves until this morning, on our way to church.
Freeway onramp — we were one of the first ones to come up on it. We’re the fourth car back from the tires. The barrier stretches across the highway and the onramp for cars heading our direction. The cars coming the other way have a clear path. We could tell it was newly lit because the backup hadn’t really stacked up yet and because the smoke was still light gray. They set it while we were all stopped at the stoplight before entering the freeway.
As the tires get going, the smoke turns black and thick.
Now I had been kind of nervous about getting stuck behind the wall of flaming tires, but in real life, it was more interesting and entertaining than scary. The perpetrators wait for a gap in traffic, then throw out the tires, light them and run off. Our favorite part was seeing this Bahraini man casually walk around to the back of his car, pull out two long poles that he obviously kept in the back for such occasions and hand them off to some younger guys who used them to rolls the burning tires off to the shoulder to clear the lanes so traffic could continue.
Another amateur photographer, taking in the scene as a guy with one of the poles tries to clear tires blocking the highway part of the fire.
The cops quickly showed up with fire extinguishers, but by then we were on our way.
As you can tell, the kids were entertained and not scared at all. I thought it would be scary, but it wasn’t. Especially since everyone was so matter-of-fact about it all, as if they clear the roads every day (some of them probably do).
Josh went home after church and found the photos of our burning on Twitter. They usually set the fires, run and hide so they can videotape or photograph the incident and then upload it to Twitter.
