Residents in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates have reported getting sick from drinking water after severe floods hit the region.
The country was battered last Tuesday when a year’s worth of rain fell in 12 hours, causing severe flooding.
Unprecedented flooding wreaked havoc at Dubai Airport, the world’s busiest international aviation hub. The weather conditions caused Emirates to cancel 200,000 passenger flights and delayed many more.
Stunning footage showed residents jet-skiing in the streets, airplanes forced to land in what appeared to be an ocean, and late-model Rolls-Royce cars being washed away. By the end of last Tuesday, more than 142 millimeters of rain had fallen in the UAE. The average year in the country sees 86 millimeters of rain.
The state-run WAM news agency called it a “historic weather event” that surpassed “anything documented since data collection began in 1949”.
People in the United Arab Emirates are showing symptoms associated with contaminated water, the UAE Ministry of Health said on Wednesday.
The statement quoted by the state news agency did not specify exactly how many people were affected or what they were being treated for.
The ministry said there were “a very limited number of cases showing some signs of having been affected by water contaminated with another substance” and that these people were being treated in hospital.
The ministry did not say what contaminated the water.
Four people lost their lives due to floods.
It also rained in Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. However, the rains were much heavier across the UAE. There is also speculation that the floods were caused by “cloud seeding”.
Some reports quoted meteorologists at the National Meteorological Center as saying that six or seven cloud-seeding flights had taken place before the rains. The center has not yet responded to questions, but flight tracking data analyzed by the Associated Press showed that a plane linked to the UAE’s cloud seeding efforts flew across the country on Sunday.
The UAE, which relies heavily on energy-intensive desalination plants to meet its water needs, is conducting cloud seeding to augment its limited and increasingly scarce groundwater.
