Thursday, November 26, 2009 JEDDAH: At least 24 people were reportedly killed and several injured in flash floods in Jeddah on Wednesday. Hundreds of homes and shops were flooded as streets turned into raging rivers.Altogether, some 70 millimeters of rain fell over the city in less than two hours — more than two-thirds of the Kingdom’s annual average rainfall.Jeddah Gov. Prince Mishaal bin Majed ordered an emergency control room to be set up to monitor the situation every 12 hours.In Abraq Al-Raghama district, near the university, entire families were forced onto their roofs to escape the rising floodwaters, polluted by sewage flushed out of the drains. As elsewhere in the city, the drainage system was unable to cope with the load of water. The city’s Civil Defense services were stretched to the limit to deal with the emergency. Throughout the day, boats and helicopters were brought in to help rescue people. By nightfall many victims were still on their roofs.In the city’s Safa district and other areas homes were without electricity from around 2 a.m. Wednesday. Residents contacted the emergency services of the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) who said the power would be restored within a couple of hours, but the lights were still out till 8 p.m. Residents complained that no one from SEC had shown up and they were sitting in candlelight. The torrential rain that drove into Jeddah from the southwest at the break of day, the first day of Haj, caused particularly severe disruption to traffic, as well as overfilling the drainage system. It caused manhole covers to lift and spew black fountains of raw sewage into the streets. Trees were uprooted and fell onto the streets, adding to the hazards. The northbound side of Madinah Road in the Al-Hamra district soon locked solid with traffic while flooding on Al-Malik Road forced vehicles into a single lane.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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