(Cairo) Four people have died in southern Egypt, in recent days plagued by torrential rains unheard of for 11 years and which have triggered an upsurge in scorpion stings, officials said.
“It had been eleven years since we had recorded such an amount of rain and this is the result of global climate change,” Khaled Qassem, local official at the Ministry of Local Development, said on Tuesday.
8 million m3 water in 55 minutes
In “55 minutes” in the night from Friday to Saturday, “eight million cubic meters of water” fell on the province of Aswan, 650 kilometers south of Cairo, detailed the governor, Achraf Attiya, in state television.
Four people died, the health ministry said, when their homes collapsed in the rain and hailstones. A total of 106 houses were washed away and more than 300 partially damaged, according to Governor Attiya.
In addition to cutting off water and electricity in some areas, the rains brought out many scorpions and “more than 500 people were stung,” the governorate announced on its Facebook page.
“Surrounded by scorpions and snakes”
In comments, residents said they were “surrounded by scorpions and snakes”, saying they were worried about “children and the elderly”.
There are four or five types of scorpions in the Egyptian desert, whose stings can cause high fevers, but no deaths from a scorpion sting have been recorded, the health ministry said.
Already during the winter of 2020, rains and floods had killed around twenty people in Egypt.
These bad weather in Egypt – a country which will host the COP27 on climate change in 2022 – occurred while the COP 26 gave birth to a text deemed lukewarm, because it does not guarantee to contain the warming to 1.5 ° C and does not respond requests for assistance from poor countries.