SHIBAM, Yemen — Mohammed bin Gohar saw an old woman drowning in floodwaters from a deadly tropical storm in southern Yemen but couldn’t save her. He was carrying his two kids and running with his wife to escape the deluge.
“The only thing I could do was hug my kids and run away with my wife as water reached our chest,” the 33-year-old said Saturday. “I heard people screaming from houses just few steps from my house.”
The death toll, now at 58, according to the government, could rise. Scores of people are still missing, and hundreds of families are homeless or trapped by the floodwaters, said Hamid el-Kharashi, a police chief in the remote southern province of Hadramut.
Damage from the storm, which first struck Thursday, has been extensive in Hadramut, Yemen’s largest province, because most homes are made of mud brick. The government has struggled to distribute relief supplies because the floods have washed out many roads.
At least 1,700 houses in the southern provinces of Mouhra and Hadramut alone have been destroyed, Yemen’s official news agency said.
Ahmed Salem’s house was in the ancient fortress city of Shibam — a UNESCO world heritage site with towering 16th-century mud-brick buildings that earned it the name “the Manhattan of the desert.”
Wet and exhausted, Salem said he fled with more than a dozen residents to a safer neighborhood nearby. He returned Saturday morning to retrieve some belongings, and the house toppled over soon after he exited.
“I lived in this house all my life,” Salem said. “I was born here.”
Television footage showed Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh moving from one devastated city to another. But most people affected by the disaster said they were receiving little help from the government.
“Officials disappeared, and they won’t show up today or in a hundred years,” said resident Yaslam bin Tarki.
Others were determined to get government assistance.
“I am not leaving until the president comes and helps me,” said a 65-year-old woman who identified herself only as Safiya, sitting teary-eyed in front of her destroyed house in Shibam.
