• Home

Phet kills 15 in Oman

The toll from Cyclone Phet, which battered Oman on Friday before barrelling towards Pakistan on Saturday, has risen to 15, with 13 more deaths reported in the sultanate, a civil defence force official said.

In Pakistan, some 60,000 people have been evacuated from the south coast to safer areas.

Among those dead in Oman was a civil defence official who died while on a rescue operation.

Royal Oman Police (ROP) sources said the official, who has not been identified yet, drowned while he was trying to save a family trapped in flash flood waters in Rustaq area in Batinah region.

Thirteen of those killed in Oman were nationals and two expats — a Bangladeshi and a Pakistani.

An Omani died when his vehicle overturned in Jebel Akhdhar (part of the Al Hajar Mountains range), and another man, also an Omani national, drowned after his car was swept away by cascading flood waters in Sumayil region.

“There are still four people missing. Rescue teams from the Royal Air Force of Oman and police are searching for them,” First Lieutenant Abdullah Al Harthy from ROP told Khaleej Times.

Meanwhile, the Inspector-general of Police and Customs, Lt.-gen. Malick bin Suleiman Al Ma’amari, who is also Chairman of the National Committee for Civil Defence (NCCD), said the focus now was on bringing back normalcy in all the affected areas as early as possible. He said the alert status in the country would remain ‘orange’ until such time that electricity and water supplies are restored and roads repaired in all places, especially in the Sharqiyah region.

“Power and telecommunications services have thankfully returned to normal in most regions and villages where they had broken down,” Al Ma’amari added, while revealing that the authorities had started work on assessing material damage in the areas hit 
by the storm. The Sharqiyah region, where the cyclone made the landfall, bore the brunt of Phet’s fury, he noted. Sources, meanwhile, said the country had resumed pumping oil that was halted during the storm on Saturday morning and oil tankers had started entering Mina Al Fahal in Muscat, the 
sultanate’s main oil terminal.

Efforts were also under way to resume flights to Masirah island so that the residents evacuated before the cyclone could be flown back home.

Al Amerat and Quriyat, the worst-affected districts, were still inaccessible on Saturday night.

ravindranath@khaleejtimes.com