Muscat has long been renowned as one of the Middle East's prettiest, with a gorgeous mountain backdrop, a smattering of hilltop castles overlooking a sparkling sea, and a proud leader who rigorously tends to his capital city.
But on Thursday, Muscat came unglued. Cyclone Gonu romped through the tidy Omani capital before heading north across the Gulf of Oman and hitting Iran.
The postcard-perfect mountains that are the city's pride became its pain. Torrential rains poured onto the bone-dry peaks and then flowed into canyons and dry riverbeds that channeled the raging water directly into the city.
PHOTO: AFP
Bridges collapsed. Buses were piled in the wadis, the normally dry riverbeds that course through the city.
Muscat's lush palm and eucalyptus groves were blown over along with telephone and power lines. Even the normally sparkling blue sea, just off the crescent-shaped Muttrah Corniche, perhaps the Arab world's prettiest, looked like foamy chocolate milk.
Cyclone Gonu left the coast of Oman and swept into a major oil shipping route toward Iran yesterday, after killing at least 32 people.
The Omani official news agency said winds from Gonu, now downgraded to a Category One hurricane, were moderate and sea waves were about 2m high.
In Muscat, residents spoke of a night of horror as turgid floodwaters ripped into their homes, carried off refrigerators and cars, and left their streets gouged by sinkholes and caked in shoals of mud.
Nidhal al-Masharafi, 31, hunkered all night on his rooftop with his wife and six children, with just the cellphone he gripped in his hand.
"The water broke through the walls. It came inside the house. It swept everything out," al-Mashrafi said, limping as he wandered the bank of a flooded wadi.
A kilometer from his home, al-Mashrafi found his Subaru Outback, lying atop a taxi in the rapids of a new roaring river that slashed through his neighborhood.
From his rooftop perch, he said he saw floodwaters sweep 16 cars past, including a Ford Explorer which bobbed by with its headlights on.
"I called the police because I thought someone was still inside," he said.
The Explorer could be seen on Thursday resting upside down, half submerged.
Residents of the hard-hit neighborhood of al-Ghubra wandered along the banks of the temporary river, searching for their cars.
"I woke up today and my car was gone. I can't find it anywhere," said Humaid al-Harthi, 25.
A few drivers desperate or foolhardy enough to drive across found themselves in rushing water up to their cars' grilles. The crossing was the only entrance to an otherwise cut-off beachfront neighborhood.
Al-Harthi and other residents said it would take at least a year to restore the upper-class district.
Few doubt the city will regain its old polish.
Muscat is Oman's showcase capital -- the Geneva of the Middle East -- where the fastidious Sultan Qaboos has decreed that highways be swept daily and laws require homeowners to cover air conditioners with decorative boxes and wash their cars every two weeks.
Those homeowners were hauling soaked bedding and carpets from their concrete villas and piling it in the streets for the bulldozers busy clearing mud and rocks.
The massive cleanup was well under way as the sun popped out in the late afternoon and began drying Muscat off.
Workers with chain saws could be seen clearing downed trees while fleets of tow trucks went to work wrenching waterlogged cars and trucks from riverbeds.
Some sections of the city still lacked power and phone services a day after Gonu's eye had passed.
"I've never seen anything like this," al-Mashrafi said, a group of friends around him nodding solemnly. "But this is life. Anything can happen."
Oman's weather centre, which has been keeping records since 1890, says Gonu could be the strongest storm to reach Oman's coast since 1977.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not