Powerful rains they whipped the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, flooding parts of major highways, leaving vehicles abandoned on roads throughout Dubai and briefly paralyzing traffic at the city-state’s massive international airport. Meanwhile, the death toll from other heavy floods in the neighboring country Oman increased to 18and others are still missing.
Rain began overnight, leaving huge puddles on normally dry streets and airport runways, while strong winds contributed to flight disruptions at Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel and headquarters. of Emirates airline.
The airport said in a series of social media posts that all operations were paused for about 25 minutes on Tuesday afternoon and that all arrivals would be diverted after that “until weather conditions improve.”
By night, more than 4.75 inches of rain had already drenched the United Arab Emirates – the typical average for an entire year in the desert nation – and more was expected in the coming hours.
Police and emergency personnel drove slowly through the flooded streets, emergency lights on as lightning streaked across the sky, occasionally touching the top of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
Authorities sent tankers into the streets to pump out floodwaters, which entered some homes, forcing people to grab buckets and buckets to try to rescue their homes.
Rain is unusual in that country, an arid nation on the Arabian Peninsula, but it occurs periodically during the colder winter months. Many roads and other areas lack drainage due to a lack of regular rainfall, which has exacerbated flooding.
Storms cause deaths in Oman
in the neighbor Omana sultanate located at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, at least 18 people died due to heavy rains in recent days, according to a Tuesday statement from the country’s National Emergency Management Committee. They include about 10 schoolchildren who were swept away in a vehicle along with an adult on Monday.
Climatologists have warned for years that human-driven climate change is causing more extreme and less predictable weather events around the world.
Parts of southern Russia and central Asia have also been dealing for days with unusually damaging amounts of rain and snowmelt, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate to higher ground and killing more than 60 people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Source: Ambito
