The worst in 27 years
The downpour paralyzed the entire city, just two days ahead of the Eid holidays, leaving the city’s shaky infrastructure crippled, perhaps for years to come.The Jamia (University) Bridge on the Haramain Highway, in eastern Jeddah, partially collapsed and was closed to traffic. A few old houses in the Jamia District collapsed as well.
Houses in the eastern districts were inundated with water, forcing families to take refuge in upper floors and on roofs. Residents, who have incurred huge property damages, said they called the Civil Defense at 993 and the police at 999 for rescue, but only got busy signals.
Brief power outage hit most of the Western Province, including Makkah, Madina, and Jeddah, the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) said. “Some flood-hit areas in Jeddah are still in the dark as it has been hard to reach locations of power transformers because of heavily-flooded roads,” Eng. Abdulaziz Aal Al-Sheikh, chairman of the SEC in the Western Province, told SPA.
In one part of Jeddah, a bus could be seen submerged under several meters of water in an underpass. A witness told AFP by phone he had seen several bodies beside another bus that overturned in the storm.
The Civil Defense deployed 120 rescue teams across the city, including eight in Jeddah’s historic downtown area, said Col. Muhammad Al-Qarni, acting chief of the Jeddah Civil Defense Department. Main intersections of the city were heavily-flooded with broken traffic lights, creating the largest traffic jams the city has seen in years.
The Jeddah Mayoralty put 130 water tanks into service to pump the water out of the streets with the help of over 1,000 workers, said Faisal Al-Shawli, director of Roads at Jeddah Mayoralty. The rainwater project is 70 percent complete, which has reduced the water gathering areas from 500 to 100. Some heavily-looded remote villages on the coast north of Jeddah were evacuated.
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