CAIRO: More than five months after flash floods hit the southern Egyptian governorate of Aswan and destroyed hundreds of homes, thousands of flood victims are still without proper shelter, they said.
“The government has done nothing whatsoever to help us overcome the damage caused by the floods,” local resident Badria Abdel Sattar, a 50-year-old single mother of five, told IRIN. “I made numerous complaints to local authorities about this, but to no avail.
To avoid sleeping in the open, Badria has rebuilt one of the rooms of her house with a ceiling made of palm tree branches and leaves, and this is where her family now sleeps.
The government had promised to give LE 25,000 ($4,587) compensation to the owners of destroyed homes and LE 15,000 ($2,752) to those whose homes were partially damaged or submerged by the January 18 floods in Aswan, more than 800 km south of Cairo.
At the time, the governor of Aswan, Mustafa Al-Sayed, announced that the total compensation in his governorate would reach LE 40 million ($7.2 million).
To date, however, just 4,000 out of 10,000 families have been compensated, according to Helal Al-Bandarawi, an Aswan Municipality official.
“The rest of the families will follow soon. We’ve already formed specialized committees to assess the damage and see who deserves compensation and who does not,” Al-Bandarawi said.
Survivors said the government needed to work faster than this as many of them continued to languish in the open in summer temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius. Some were fortunate enough to be able to stay in other families’ homes at night until their own homes are rebuilt, while others are making do with makeshift tents in the searing heat.
“These committee members came here and registered our names a long time ago,” Adel Mohamed, a neighbor of Badria, said. “And that was it. We haven’t seen anybody from the government since.”
Floods also occurred in the Sinai Peninsula on January 18 destroying 780 homes, submerging 1,076 and displacing tens of thousands of people, according to local authorities. Residents there have also complained of negligence by the authorities and the lack of appropriate post-flood compensation.
