The people of Imam Malek and Shaltout villages in Alexandria saw their homes reduced to ashes on June 8 as a result of a fire caused by a powerful return of electrical power after long outages, destroying nearly 420 homes.

“I was working on our land with my wife and children at the dawn of this Saturday and there had been no electricity in the village for three hours, recalled Abdulmuhssen Farraj, a 55-year-old farmer. “We heard a large explosion and we saw smoke rising and flames fiercely raging around houses.”

The people of Imam Malek and Shaltout villages in Alexandria saw their homes reduced to ashes on June 8 as a result of a fire caused by a powerful return of electrical power after long outages, destroying nearly 420 homes.

“I was working on our land with my wife and children at the dawn of this Saturday and there had been no electricity in the village for three hours, recalled Abdulmuhssen Farraj, a 55-year-old farmer. “We heard a large explosion and we saw smoke rising and flames fiercely raging around houses.”

The devastated villagers blocked the highway near their village in order to draw attention to the disaster, which came amid a sentiment of continuous neglect by officials.

Too little, too late

A dark cloud covering the sky over the village of Shaltout, 64 kilometers west of Alexandria, and corpses of burnt livestock scattering everywhere show the intensity of the damage left by the fire last week. The village’s homes—one or two-story-high clay structures, with roofs made of wood bonds covered with rice straw, helped the flames sweep easily over the homes.

“I rushed with my family to check on our home but we did not find it because the wind and the flames were much faster and everything in our home, even the walls, was totally destroyed,” Farraj said. “My wife kept crying and shouting as a result of the horror of the scene and the villagers were rushing to bring water to put out the raging fire. The fire engines arrived two hours later when the villagers succeeded in extinguishing most of the fire.”

“I do not have anything now, even to buy bread for the day, and I do not know how I am going to survive after my home was destroyed because of electricity and because the government wanted to reduce the electrical loads. As for Morsi and his minions, we say: “Sufficient unto us is God!”

Reducing electrical loads is to blame

According to a report issued by the DA’s office in Beheira and Alexandria, the cause of the disaster that struck the two villages is a short circuit due to illegally connecting electric power to the villages and a lack of an insulating material on the wires for protection.  The repeated outages, bad weather conditions and high temperatures led to a severe short circuit, which caused those homes to burn.

The disaster came in times where incidents of electrical equipment burning as a result of the return of electric power are no longer rare in Egypt. “The phenomenon of increased currents can be attributed to the charges stored inside the electrical equipment. When the current flows back, it interacts with that stored inside the equipment, creating a spark and causing a flame and sometimes an explosion,” says Mohammed Bakr, Director of Alexandria Electricity Company. 

In addition, says Bakr, the high temperatures in most Egyptian governorates contribute to causing explosions and fires, not to mention illegally connecting houses to the electricity system from bare wires, which interact with heat and current, causing such disasters.

“The fire killed our cow”

Working as a day farmer to support her husband, Khadija Abdulfadil looks like an old woman even though she is only 40 years old. She wears a black shabby dress covered with mud and ash, the skin over her face and hands is sore and cracked by exposure to long hours of work in her land under the burning sun, and the grief and sorrow on her face tell a thousand stories.

“The flames consumed everything we own, including the fowl and the cow, which was the only source of income for me and my children. The power was off and suddenly it returned and then the flames were raging very fast everywhere in the village,” she said.

“When the fire started, my only concern was to save my three little children and get them out of the house. The officials did not care and left us to face our fate,” she concluded.

Blocking the highway

The scene was not so different in the village of Imam Malek in Wadi El Natrun Valley in Beheira Governorate. The villagers blocked Cairo-Alexandria desert highway for two hours, hoping that the officials would hear their cries and come to rescue them, but in vain. The flames destroyed nearly 400 homes and killed more than 4,000 livestock and hundreds of fowl.

“We have been thirsty for a long time now and the village has no services, no sewage disposal, no drinking water and even the irrigation water only comes two days a week, which has turned our lands into wastelands. The government only knew that more than 400 homes had been burned when we blocked the highway with burning tires,” says Omran Thabet, a local farmer.

“Our village has not been serviced with piped water yet and we are forced to drink from the local canal and as a result every home in the village is now suffering from kidney failure and liver diseases. Our village is marginalized and no one knows anything about it. We do not have a school, a hospital, a police station, an ambulance or means of transportation. We travel by carriages, tuk tuk and on donkeys,” he added.

Farmer Mahmoud Abdussattar said: “We could not find water to put out the fire and no fire engine came to the rescue. It was the villagers who extinguished the fire. How is it possible that a village like Imam Malek with a population of 25,000 people can be left alone like that with no one caring about its needs and no official doing anything for it?”

“We were struck by another disaster when we saw Beheira’s governor on TV stressing that he had visited us and decided to pay 5,000 Egyptian pounds for every affected family. This never happened.  Neither the governor nor any of his employees came to us.  It’s as if our village had not existed on the map,” he added.

Governor solves village problems

After the highway was blocked, the officials acted and Beheira Governor Eng. Mukhtar Hamlawi alloted 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$ 900) for each family, stressing that all damaged possessions were listed by three committees formed by the Social Affairs Department in order to pay suitable compensations.

“The livestock killed in the fire will also be listed by a veterinary committee and suitable compensations will be paid to owners, whether insured or not,” he added, underlying that the electricity company would repair all lines and connections at its expense.

A piece of land, says the governor, has been allocated to build a civil protection unit; the village will be provided with an ambulance, schools, a hospital and a dispensary; and the water problem will be solved by installing a water meter for every home.

He suggested that he would submit those needs to Prime Minister Dr. Hesham Qandil and promised all villagers to solve their problems very soon.