Hundreds buried in Cairo rockslide

06/09/2008| IslamWeb

Hundreds of people have been crushed in their homes after a mountain landslide in a small town on the outskirts of Egypt's capital.

 

Officials said at least eight rocks, some measuring 30m high, had buried more than 50 homes in the poor district of Manshiyet Nasron on Saturday.

 

At least 18 people have been declared dead and 35 injured.

 

Some estimates put the number of buried at 500.

 

Police are still waiting for heavy machinery to lift the rocks, some weighing between 60 and 70 tons.

 

One witness said a six-storey building had been reduced to rubble by the impact.

 

Hassan Ibrahim Hassan, 80, whose house escaped the destruction, said: "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 and I saw the whole mountain had collapsed."

 

Manshiyet Nasron is notoriously overcrowded. Most of the apartment buildings provide families with only a single room.

 

The town's buildings are cramped at the base of the Mouqattum hills next to a main highway into Cairo.

 

Poverty and overcrowding

 

In a survey carried out by UN Habitat, a human settlement program, Manshiyet Nasron is described as "the largest squatter/informal area in Cairo. There are 350,000 persons living in this area on about 850 acres with a gross residential density more than 400 persons/acre".

 

"The area is suffering from poor living qualities, inadequate services, lack of infrastructure, and deteriorated environmental conditions. The site is characterized by sharp contour variations ranging between 56 and 200m," the survey said.

 

In 2003, the housing ministry, under the auspices of the Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, launched a campaign to provide housing for some of the poorest Cairo residents, including in the affected town.

 

Slow response

 

Much of the digging is being done by hand by relatives and neighbors searching for survivors or bodies. Police have brought in sniffer dogs to locate the trapped.

 

Locals were enraged at what they saw as an inadequate government response.

 

Witnesses described hundreds of weeping and screaming family members cursing the local authorities and saying they had relatives and friends trapped beneath the rubble.

 

Hussein Abdul Ghani, Al Jazeera's Egypt bureau chief, said: "Rescue teams and civil defense employees do not know what to do or how to rescue those trapped under the debris."

 

One man said to a policeman at the scene: "You've just got your hands in your pockets, you're not doing anything."

 

Parliament fire

 

A fire in Egypt's upper house of parliament in August, in which one person died, was fought by the military using helicopters.

 

Abdul Ghani said the cause of the landslide could have been from a contractor who was carrying out construction work at the top of the mountain.

 

Manshiyet Nasron residents had informed the authorities a year ago that there was a split between the rocks, a potential danger to the homes below.

 

Police expect the toll to rise.

 

PHOTO CAPTION

 

Egyptians search for survivors under the rubble of homes at the site of a massive rock slide off [AFP].

 

Al-Jazeera