“This has been going on since Thursday (Jan. 27, a day after the flooding) and water keeps rising up from the ground and from outside,” said Jawed Khan, a 43-year-old shopkeeper in Jeddah's Sharafiyah district. “I cannot give a good estimation on the amount of goods that has been lost or stolen yet. We are just concerned with cleaning the store.”
Municipal authorities estimate at least 25,000 buildings and 90 percent of roads in the city were affected by the flooding.
Abu Nawaf, who owns a car rental company, said 40 of his vehicles parked in a below-ground space were completely submerged.
“We couldn’t do anything about it because the water reached the roof of the basement,” said Abu Nawaf. “Now I have to get all those cars to the workshop for repairs, which will cost me a lot of money that I can’t afford at the moment.”
Palestine Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the city, was among the areas hit hard by the floods. Many shops in the mobile phone souk on the street lost their merchandise.
“I own a mall in Palestine Street where most of the shops sell electronic goods and mobile phone. On that fateful Wednesday the shopkeepers walked into my office crying. All their stocks were damaged beyond repair by floodwater that seeped into the market,” said Thamer Al-Tayyeb, owner of Al-Ameer Center. “Everything was gone and the underground was overflowing with filthy water. We tried calling sewage-truck drivers to pump out the water but they asked us to pay SR2,000 per truck; we needed around 50.”
Al-Tayyeb said when they contacted the municipality they were told that municipal workers were busy at other locations.
“This left us with no choice but to resort to primitive ways to remove the water manually,” said Al-Tayyeb.
Mohsin Saeed, a 45-year-old store worker, said the municipality should find a more rapid way of responding to floods.
Several stores and shops in South Jeddah have been closed for days, their owners busy cleaning up.
“We are putting everything inside the store on sale,” said one shopkeeper. “There is no point in cleaning these items in the hope of reselling them later. We will incur great losses, but at this moment it seems the only reasonable thing to do, especially when the majority of us can't afford expensive insurance policies against natural disasters.”
