Cyclone Flooding Strands Iranian Towns
Pastor Dale Morgan
Jun 8, 2:21 PM EDT
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Cyclone Flooding Strands Iranian Towns*
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer
TEHRAN, IRAN (AP) -- Floods spawned by the remnants of Cyclone Gonu
stranded dozens of tiny villages in the deserts of southern Iran on
Friday, cutting off roads, power and communications and sending some
residents into trees for safety.
Water encircled more than 100 villages deep in Kerman Province, where
many residents subsist on livestock and small farm plots in villages
consisting of a handful of families. The storm killed at least 52 people
- 49 in Oman and three in Iran - with more than two dozen missing.
Lieutenant Siamak Miladi, a police commander in the Iranian town of
Kalaganj, said rescue workers were expected to reach many villages by
helicopter Saturday.
"Power and telephone lines were affected by the flood there, so we do
not have any access to them for the time being," he told The Associated
Press in a telephone interview.
Flooding also swamped dozens of villages in neighboring Sistan and
Baluchistan province, where the state news agency said some inhabitants
had climbed up onto treetops.
The floodwaters drove out the residents of Shahrestan village, near the
port city of Chabahar, according to the official Islamic Republic News
Agency.
"Some of them are living in trees," villager Slam Hood told IRNA. "Since
the beginning of the storm on Wednesday we have not received any relief
assistance."
The report quoted Ebrahim Hood, another local in the village, as saying
that, "Children, old people and women will lose their life if the
assistance does not arrive."
Iran's meteorological office said the storm had become a high-pressure
system creating rainshowers and wind in southeastern Iran.
Video footage showed people taking their belongings to higher ground,
and said hundreds were living in tents in the port town of Konarak. It
also said regular flights to the town's airport had restarted.
In Bandar Abbas, Iran's main non-oil port, some people were living in
school auditoriums, where they moved during the storm, the report said.
State television said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki
offered help for stricken areas in Oman, which suffered the worst of the
storm when it made landfall on Wednesday.
At the height of the storm in Oman, winds swept up to 95 mph, according
to the U.S. military's Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Oman's weather
center said that Gonu was believed to be the strongest and deadliest
storm to strike Oman since 1977, when 500 people were killed.
The storm spared the region's oil installations, and oil futures fell
Friday on a wave of profit-taking that followed a surge in prices a day
earlier. News that Cyclone Gonu had spared major oil installations in
the Gulf of Oman also alleviated supply concerns.
Light, sweet crude for July delivery fell 62 cents to $66.31 a barrel in
morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange after dropping as
low as $65.55 early in the session.
Iranian state TV's Web site said two government workers taking emergency
supplies to a flooded area were killed Wednesday when a river overflowed
and flipped their truck in Jask. A third Iranian died in Bandar Abbas
from a car accident blamed on low visibility from the bad weather, state
TV said.
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Associated Press writers Hassan Sarbakhshian and Nasser Karimi in
Tehran, Iran, and Jim Krane in Muscat, Oman, contributed to this report.