Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Heavy rains lashed the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, flooding portions of major highways, leaving vehicles abandoned on roadways across Dubai and grinding traffic at the city-state’s huge international airport briefly to a complete halt. Meanwhile, the death toll from separate heavy flooding in neighboring Oman rose to 18, with others still missing as the sultanate prepared for the storm.
The rains began overnight, leaving massive ponds on normally parched streets and airport tarmacs as whipping winds contributed to flight disruptions at Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel and the home of the long-haul carrier Emirates. The airport said in a series of social media posts that all operations were halted for about 25 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, and that all arrivals would be diverted after that “until the weather conditions improve.”
By the evening, more than 4.75 inches of rainfall had soaked the UAE — the typical average for an entire year in the desert nation — with more expected in the coming hours.
Abdel Hadi Ramahi/REUTERS
Police and emergency personnel drove slowly through the flooded streets, their emergency lights flashing as bolts of lightning flashed across the sky, occasionally touching the tip of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
Schools across the UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms, largely shut ahead of the storm and government employees were mostly working remotely where possible. Many workers stayed home as well, though some ventured out, with the unfortunate stalling out their vehicles in deeper-than-expected water covering some roads.
Authorities sent tanker trucks out into the streets to pump away the floodwaters, which poured into some homes, forcing people to grab buckets and pails to try to bail out their houses.
Rain is unusual in the UAE, an arid Arabian Peninsula nation, but occurs periodically during the cooler winter months. Many roads and other areas lack drainage given the lack of regular rainfall, which has exacerbated the flooding.
Abdel Hadi Ramahi/REUTERS
Rain also fell in Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
In neighboring Oman, a sultanate that rests on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, at least 18 people had been killed in heavy rains in recent days, according to a Tuesday statement from the country’s National Committee for Emergency Management. That includes about 10 schoolchildren who were swept away Monday in a vehicle along with an adult.
Climatologists have warned for years that human-driven climate change is fueling more extreme and less predictable weather events across the globe.
Parts of southern Russia and Central Asia have also been dealing for days with unusually damaging amounts of rainfall and snowmelt, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate to higher ground and killing more than 60 people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
