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.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS