- Record rainfall causes severe flooding in United Arab Emirates
- Four killed in UAE, twenty-one in Oman by storm
- Dubai experiences unprecedented flooding, flights canceled, roads submerged
Roads were flooded and hundreds of flights were canceled as a result of the 5.6 inches of precipitation that Dubai received in a single day due to severe thunderstorms.
This week, severe flooding in the United Arab Emirates was caused by record-breaking rainfall, according to officials. Four people were killed.
A minimum of twenty-one persons were killed when the storm struck Oman over the weekend. On Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) received its heaviest rainfall since records began in 1949.
During the floods in the UAE, two Filipina women perished by suffocation in a vehicle, according to a statement from the Department of Migrant Workers of the Philippines.
The department added that a Filipino national was slain when his vehicle became entangled in a sinkhole in the country.
A seventy-year-old Emirati man perished when his vehicle was carried away by floodwaters in the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.
As of yet, the precise number of fatalities attributed to the cyclone in the UAE remains uncertain due to the lack of information released by UAE authorities.
The United Arab Emirates, comprising Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah, and Fujairah, is a federation of seven emirates with an arid desert climate and little precipitation on average.
On the contrary, the enormous typhoon that struck the nation this week affected all seven sheikhdoms, with Dubai receiving an accumulation of over 5.59 inches of precipitation on Tuesday.
Annual precipitation in the city is an average of 4.7 inches.
Explosions of lightning and flash flooding
Occasionally, lightning touched the Burj Khalifa, the highest structure in the world, as it ripped across the sky.
Flooding occurs on numerous highways and in other areas of Dubai as a result of inadequate drainage caused by the lack of consistent precipitation.
On Friday, a portion of the primary road that links Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the most populous emirate, remained closed. In the interim, vehicles traversed low water on the hard shoulder, passing abandoned cars and buses along the alternate route.
Local media outlets in the northern region of the UAE, including the emirate of Sharjah, reported on Friday that residents remained confined to their homes.
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In the interim, Emirates, a long-haul carrier, announced via the X social platform that local check-in for passengers on its flights would be suspended once more until early Saturday to “support operations recovery from the recent bad weather at our Dubai hub.”
Since Tuesday, 1,478 flights to and from Dubai had been canceled as of Friday morning, or roughly 30 percent of all flights, as reported by the aircraft flight monitoring website FlightRadar24.
Tuesday witnessed flooding on the tarmac of Dubai International Airport, the busiest airport for international travel, as aircraft circled an area resembling a lake.
Initial reports associated the severe weather conditions with “cloud seeding,” a technique employed by the government wherein small aircraft traverse clouds while emitting specialized salt pyrotechnics, thereby stimulating precipitation.
Later, however, experts concluded that the practice could not have caused so much precipitation and that climate change and other factors were more likely to blame.
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