'Apocalyptic' Dubai floods shake picture-perfect city
By Sean Seddon
If Dubai is the ultimate Instagram city, then this was the week the filter came off.
Over an unprecedented 48 hours, the skies over the United Arab Emirates darkened and torrential storms washed away Dubai’s picture-perfect image.
About 25cm (10in) of rain – roughly twice the UAE’s yearly average – fell in a single day, leaving much of the city’s outdoor infrastructure under water.
Jordache Ruffels, a British expat living in Dubai, told BBC News experiencing the storms was like “living through the apocalypse”.
He watched from his apartment overlooking the city’s usually tranquil marina as furniture was flung from balconies by gale-force winds and Rolls Royce cars were abandoned on roads suddenly transformed into rivers.
“We live high up and could barely see a thing past the balcony… It felt like midnight in the middle of the afternoon,” he said.
A cluster of four large storms, each of them towering 15km (9 miles) into the atmosphere and fuelled by a powerful jet streams, rolled into the UAE one after another, according to forecasters at BBC Weather.
Heavy rainfall over the desert landscape of the Gulf is not unheard of, and residents were warned via a public alert system – but Dubai’s weather infrastructure was unprepared for the worst rain since 1949.
