Dubai International Airport, href="https://apnews.com/article/dubai-airport-2023-passengers-d9438834db9a820cb34842dbb2d9086a">the world’s busiest for international travel, is allowing global carriers to again fly into Terminal 1 at the airfield. And long-haul carrier Emirates, crucial to East-West travel, has begun allowing local passengers to arrive at Terminal 3, their base of operations.
However, Dubai Airport CEO Paul Griffiths said in an interview with The Associated Press that the airfield needed at least another 24 hours to resume operations close to its usual schedule. Meanwhile, in one desert community in Dubai, floodwaters continued to rise to as much as 1m as civil defence officials struggled to pump out the water.
“We were looking at the radar thinking, ‘goodness, if this hits, then it’s going to be cataclysmic,’” Griffiths said of the storm. “And indeed it was.”
The airport ended up needing 22 tankers with vacuum pumps to get water off its grounds. Griffiths acknowledged that taxiways flooded during the rains, though the airport’s runways remained free of water to safely operate. Online videos of a FlyDubai flight landing with its reverse thrust spraying out water caught the world’s attention.
A man walks along a road barrier among floodwater caused by heavy rain on Sheikh Zayed Rd highway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo / AP
“It looks dramatic, but it actually isn’t that dramatic,” Griffiths said.
Emirates, whose operations had been struggling since the storm earlier this week had stopped travellers flying out of the UAE from checking into their flights as they tried to move out connecting passengers. Pilots and flight crews also had a hard time reaching the airport given the water on roadways.
But Emirates has now lifted that order to allow customers into the airport. Some 2000 people came into Terminal 3, again sparking long lines, Griffiths said.
Others who arrived at the airport described hours-long waits to get their baggage; some just gave up to head home or to whatever hotel would have them.
The UAE, a hereditarily ruled, autocratic nation on the Arabian Peninsula, typically has little rainfall in its arid desert climate. However, a massive storm forecasters had been warning about for days blew through the country’s seven sheikhdoms.
By the end of Tuesday local time, more than 142mm of rainfall had soaked Dubai over 24 hours. On an average year, Dubai International Airport gets 94.7mm of rain. Other areas of the country had even more precipitation.
Abandoned vehicles stand in floodwater caused by heavy rain along Sheikh Zayed Rd highway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo / AP
Intense floods also have struck neighbouring Oman in recent days. Authorities have raised the death toll from those storms to at least 21.
The UAE’s drainage systems quickly became overwhelmed on Tuesday, flooding neighbourhoods, business districts and even portions of the 12-lane Sheikh Zayed Rd highway running through Dubai.
The state-run WAM news agency called the rain “a historic weather event” that surpassed “anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949”.
In a message to the nation late on Wednesday local time, Emirati leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, said authorities would “quickly work on studying the condition of infrastructure throughout the UAE and to limit the damage caused”.
On Thursday, people waded through oil-slicked floodwater to reach cars earlier abandoned, checking to see if their engines still ran. Tanker trucks with vacuums began reaching some areas outside Dubai’s downtown core for the first time as well. Schools remain closed until next week.
Authorities have offered no overall damage or injury information from the floods, which killed at least one person.
However, in at least one community, the effects of the rainfall only got worse on Thursday. In Mudon, a development by the state-owned Dubai Properties, flooding in one neighbourhood reached as much as 1m. Civil defence workers tried to pump the water out, but it was a struggle as people waded through the floodwater.
Residents of Mudon, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity given the UAE’s strict laws governing speech, described putting together the equivalent of nearly US$2000 (NZ$3400) to get a tanker to the community. They alleged the developers did nothing to help prior to that, even as they called and emailed. They also said a nearby sewage processing facility failed, bringing more water into their homes.
A man carries luggage through floodwater caused by heavy rain while waiting for transportation on Sheikh Zayed Rd highway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo / AP
“A lot of people were in denial of how bad it was,” one homeowner said as civil defence officials waded through the water, bringing bottled water on a raft.
Dubai Holding, a state-owned company that has Dubai Properties as an arm, did not respond to questions. It’s part of a wider nexus that US diplomats have called “Dubai Inc” — all properties overseen by the city-state’s ruling family.
The flooding sparked speculation that the UAE’s aggressive campaign of cloud seeding — flying small planes through clouds dispersing chemicals aimed at getting rain to fall — may have contributed to the deluge. However, experts said the storm systems that produced the rain were forecast well in advance and cloud seeding alone would not have caused such flooding.
Scientists also say climate change is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme storms, droughts, floods and wildfires around the world. Dubai hosted the United Nations COP28 climate talks just last year.
Abu Dhabi’s state-linked newspaper The National in an editorial on Thursday described the heavy rains as a warning to countries in the wider Persian Gulf region to “climate-proof their futures”.
“The scale of this task is more daunting than it appears even at first glance, because such changes involve changing the urban environment of a region that for as long as it has been inhabited, has experienced little but heat and sand,” the newspaper said.
