Floods in Mecca after extreme downpours

The city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the holiest city in the Muslim religion, experienced heavy flooding on Monday after torrential downpours.

Videos job by Saudi citizens and media showed entire neighborhoods submerged, with residents forming human chains to rescue children from flooded homes, washed away trees and abandoned vehicles after stalling in deep waters.

Flooding was also reported in Medina, another holy city of Islam, and Jeddah, the main Red Sea port city. Medina actually recorded the heaviest rainfall on record on Monday with 49.2mm – a debilitating downpour for a city. built in an oasis surrounded by dry hills and lava fields.

India today describe the situation in Mecca is described as “chaos”, pushing rescue operations and damage control to their limits.

Saudi Arabia’s National Meteorological Center (NCM) has forecast more rain and storms during the week, bringing flood threats to other cities, including the national capital of Riyadh. The MNC has issued “red alerts” in several areas, closing public spaces and schools.

The latest heavy rains in the region killed 21 people in Oman and four in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in April. The United Arab Emirates said the storms were the heaviest rainfall it had seen in 75 years.

Jeddah, one of the most flood-affected cities in Saudi Arabia, suffered heavy flooding in 2009 that killed more than a hundred people.

United Kingdom Daily Mail note that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states tend to experience heavy rainfall in winter and that many of their cities are built on rocky or desert terrain that has difficulty absorbing high levels of precipitation, but “many Cities have notoriously underdeveloped drainage and sewage systems. »

Floodwater controls in Jeddah are particularly inadequate for the needs of the coastal city, but complaints from its residents have not been heeded.

THE Daily Mail also addressed rumors that excessive cloud seeding by the United Arab Emirates may have been partly responsible for the excessive rainfall. Regional experts said the rains were too intense to be explained by cloud seeding, which can increase seasonal precipitation by at best 30 percent.

“The UAE has an operational cloud seeding program to improve rainfall in this arid part of the world. However, there is no technology that can create or even seriously modify this type of rain event,” said Maarten Ambaum, professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading.