Mon, Sep 08, 2008 page6

• Rockslide kills 31 in crowded section of Cairo

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  Thirty-one people were killed and 23 injured when a massive rockslide hit a crowded Cairo shantytown on Saturday, sending rocks and boulders crashing down on dozens of houses, security and medical sources said.

  Tumbling rocks destroyed many buildings in the Manshiyet Nasser shantytown in eastern Cairo near the Moqattam plateau, its close-packed houses and narrow alleys huddled at the foot of cliffs beside a highway.

  State news agency MENA said parts of the area were being evacuated because new cracks had been seen in the cliff face.

  

  Residents, police and firemen try to clear rubble with their bare hands and basic tools after a rockslide from the Muqattam cliffs onto the sprawling Manshiyet Nasr slum on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, on Saturday. Massive boulders crashed down on the shantytown, killing at least 31 people.

  PHOTO: AP

  Dozens of police and rescue workers were sent to the scene, backed up by fire engines, ambulances and sniffer dogs, but locals were enraged at what they saw as an inadequate government response to the disaster.

  Hundreds of weeping, yelling residents gathered round the cordoned-off site, cursing local authorities and saying they had relatives and friends trapped beneath the rubble.

  “You’ve just got your hands in your pockets, you’re not doing anything,” one man yelled at police standing nearby.

  “If it were the Shura council [upper house of parliament], you’d have had the army in by now,” another shouted.

  When fire broke out in Egypt’s upper house of parliament last month, killing one person, the military were called out to battle the blaze with helicopters.

  “It was horror. The power went out, we heard a loud bang like an earthquake and I thought this house had collapsed. I went out, I saw the whole mountain had collapsed,” said Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, 80, whose house escaped the destruction.

  One six-story building was reduced to rubble by the landslide, witnesses said.

  Disaster struck at 8:50am, when huge boulders estimated by one official as each weighing “hundreds of tonnes” broke off Moqattam hill and struck Isbat Bekhit in the densely populated Manshiyet Nasser neighborhood.

  The section of hill that broke away was estimated at 60m wide and 15m long.

  Lawmaker Haidar Bardadi said he expected the death toll to rise drastically, saying 35 homes had been crushed and between 150 and 200 people were trapped beneath the rubble.

  Rescuers used their bare hands to shift debris in a desperate bid to search for victims, while police cordoned off the area and specialist dog handlers were deployed to try to locate survivors.

  But rescue teams were forced to wait for five hours for cranes and special heavy lifting machinery to arrive before they could move the rocks.

  “It was horrible, like an earthquake,” said Sarghali Gharib, who lost eight members of his family in the rockslide — five sisters, a sister-in-law and her two children.

  Many parts of Cairo are densely crowded, packed with families who poured into the city from impoverished rural areas. Some districts hold about 41,000 people per square kilometer and residents say they have suffered from decades of government neglect.

  The shantytown of Manshiyet Nasser, with its red brick houses and unpaved narrow alleys is famously overcrowded, with entire families sometimes squeezed into a single room.
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