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Apocalyptic Dubai floods shake picture-perfect city

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Vehicles sit abandoned in floodwater covering a major road in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, April 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)

If Dubai is the ultimate Instagram city, then this was the week the filter came off.

Over an unprecedented 48 hours, the skies over the United Arab Emirates darkened and torrential storms washed away Dubai’s picture-perfect image.

About 25cm (10in) of rain – roughly twice the UAE’s yearly average – fell in a single day, leaving much of the city’s outdoor infrastructure under water.

Jordache Ruffels, a British expat living in Dubai, told BBC News experiencing the storms was like “living through the apocalypse”.

He watched from his apartment overlooking the city’s usually tranquil marina as furniture was flung from balconies by gale-force winds and Rolls Royce cars were abandoned on roads suddenly transformed into rivers.

“We live high up and could barely see a thing past the balcony… It felt like midnight in the middle of the afternoon,” he said.

A cluster of four large storms, each of them towering 15km (9 miles) into the atmosphere and fuelled by a powerful jet streams, rolled into the UAE one after another, according to forecasters at BBC Weather.

Heavy rainfall over the desert landscape of the Gulf is not unheard of, and residents were warned via a public alert system – but Dubai’s weather infrastructure was unprepared for the worst rain since 1949.

In many ways, few modern cities would have coped with the size of the deluge that hit Dubai this week.

The city’s top attractions – largely indoors to protect from the searing heat – struggled to handle the sudden influx of water.

Caroline Seubert, 29, from the UK, was with her husband at a shopping centre when the storm hit.

“The mall was flooded, ceilings were collapsing,” she said. “We were told to leave, but the metro was shut and the taxis were not running.

“We were stranded, had to sleep in the mall lobby overnight.”

Matt Weir, a British teacher who has been based in Dubai for 10 years, said “people were aware” a storm was coming but the force of it left “neighbourhoods under water”.
While the forecast looks more typically blue and sunny for the week ahead, some storms remain possible – and with roads and other infrastructure still crippled, Dubai’s rulers are counting the cost.

The UAE’s President Sheikh Mohammed bin Nahyan issued a public order for “authorities to quickly work on studying the condition of infrastructure throughout the UAE and to limit the damage caused”.

Government employees have been told to work from home until the end of the week, while private firms have been encouraged to do the same. Schools across the country have been shuttered.

So far, the official death toll in the UAE is just one person – an elderly man who died when his vehicle was swept away in Ras Al Khaimah, according to local media.
Some of the worst disruption has been at Dubai International Airport, the world’s second busiest, where nearly 90 million people – more than the population of Germany – are expected to pass through in 2024.

It is an important hub for travel to the Gulf and connecting flights heading further afield – but witnesses say it has descended into bedlam after the floods.

A flooded taxiway meant planes were unable to reach the runway to take off and passengers were left stranded in the terminal building.

The country’s state-owned airline Emirates was forced to stop accepting check-in passengers at all. While it has since re-opened check-in, it says many passengers “are still waiting to get on flights”.
Jo Reilly is among the travellers left in limbo. The 41-year-old was flying back to the UK from Vietnam via Dubai with her daughters Holly, 13, and Ruby, nine, when the storm struck.

After two-and-a-half hours circling over the Gulf waiting for a chance to land, they eventually landed at another Dubai airport, before being told in the middle of the night to get on a bus to head for their original destination.

She told BBC News her daughters “were practically crushed in a stampede as hundreds of desperate people were fighting for a seat on the coach”.

Once they eventually reached Dubai International Airport, the situation was no better. Jo said: “We asked can we have water, can we have food? Nothing. There’s nothing here. People are really, really in a bad way.

“We’ve been told it’s Sunday night the earliest we can get home and apparently we’re quite lucky to have that option.
“Emirates are saying there are no hotel rooms so I said, ‘Oh, so we’re just to carry on sleeping on the floor?’ And they said, ‘Yes, go make yourself comfortable over there’ and pointed to the corner of the check-in area.”
Jonathan Finchett, also from the UK, described “apocalyptic” scenes in the airport, where people were arriving to find their flights had been cancelled.

He told BBC News he saw families “barricading themselves behind a circle of luggage trolleys to keep themselves safe because they didn’t feel that safe because there was absolutely no staff”.

Queues at ticket desks were “pure chaos”, he said, adding: “There were hundreds of people stampeding towards this, like a crush. All of a sudden you had women screaming saying they couldn’t breathe.”
Emirates said it appreciated “how difficult it is for everyone affected” and that schedules were returning to normal.

Dubai International Airport said: “As much as possible, we’ve been providing necessary assistance and amenities to affected guests but due to road blockages, it’s taken longer than we would have liked.”

As for how things are now in the city, Jordache Ruffels said things had “practically returned to normal” after swift action by the authorities. “There’s a sense of unity and togetherness in times like this,” he added.

The storms hit a Dubai – home to 3.5m people – which would be unrecognisable to the 100,000 residents who called it home in the 1970s, before the oil boom.

Source:BBC

9 COMMENTS

  1. The Middle East has not always been a desert. I have always wondered what happened so long ago. It was already a desert during the time of Jesus Christ and Muhammad the Muslim prophet. Did the unsustainable farming practices of the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations lead to desertification?

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  2. Perhaps the idea of selling Mopani to UAE government funded entity with no experience in mining – and ignoring due process – wasn’t such a great idea? The rain was bring a message.

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    • Anthony,the two are completely different all together.
      what happened that day is as a result called Cloud Seeding. This is a process of weather modification aimed at increasing precipitation or even decreasing precipitation through the use of plane or rockets. Rich countries do this all the time. Unfortunately,every time we try to alter God’s creation,there is always an adverse effect. Please stop politicizing what this government is doing for the sake of the masses.

  3. When you have capital in cash, you can buy or start anything because you can buy the expertise to help you run or manage whatever you want to run. Elon Musk had no expertise in electric cars when he started his Tesla car company. Musk is not an engineer or designer.

  4. This deal is rather fishy. I’m wondering if our minister of mines Kabuswe got a kickback for this and other mining concessions? He’s suddenly amassed a lot of cash buying up properties in Lusaka and his constituency on the copperbelt using his brother’s name. Kabuswe is a former die-hard PF who only left the party to join UPND after the former refused to adopt him as the PF-MP candidate for Chililabombwe. This chap may have come with his old PF corrupt habits to UPND. ACC may need to investigate him before he embarrasses H.E. HH.

  5. You see how clean the flood waters are? If this was Zambia it’d be trashy brown waters …the kind of filth that brought cholera during the evil reign of PF in 2017-2018.

    • Not necessarily. Our flood water is normally brown because of presence of organic materials in our soils and the normally red colour of some of our soils. Desert sand has little organic material in it because it is in a dry and barren area. Because of that flood water in the Middle East tends to be clear.

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