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.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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