Egyptian police on Sunday moved shantytown residents from the site of a rock slide that killed at least 31 and left countless more buried, amid concerns that more rocks could tumble from the unstable cliffs overhead.
Police also forced journalists to leave the area. Heavy machinery had yet to tackle the massive slabs of rock, some the size of apartment buildings, that split away from the Muqattam cliffs early Saturday, crushing the shantytown below.
A security official said 31 bodies had been pulled from the rubble and 46 people had been treated at hospitals, but that many other people remained buried.
The government said it hopes to evacuate the entire area because of fears that more of the limestone cliffs that tower above the Manshiyet Nasr slum might tumble down. They also plan to demolish more local houses to access the area with heavy machinery.
Opposition and independent papers were sharply critical Sunday about the government’s slow handling of the relief operation.
As they moved residents from the scene Sunday, police occasionally jostled with journalists, pushing a few and ordering them from the scene.
Delay in arrival of recovery equipment
The densely populated shantytown sits among unstable cliffs, bordered by a railroad track that has made it difficult to get heavy recovery machinery into the area. More than 24 hours after the incident, rescue operations were still being carried out largely by hand by residents.
Aboul-Ela Amin Mohammed, the head of the earthquake department at the National Research Institute for Astronomy and Geophysics, said the entire plateau is in danger of further collapse.
“The area is full of densely packed informal housing with no central sewer system. When the sewage touches the fragile surface of the limestone, it changes its consistency into a flour-like paste,” he said.
Similar disasters happened in 1994 and 2002, and just in recent months residents had been complaining about instability in the area.
Mahmoud Samir, a construction worker from the slum, said many in the neighbourhood had long expected something like the rock slide to happen because of visible cracks in the cliffs.
Egypt rock slide toll rises to 31
