By Fatemah Farag Martyrs Street in the Ard Al-Liwa district is essentially no different from many other streets that criss-cross the working class quarters of Cairo. Narrow, unpaved, lined with red brick buildings, most of them unlicensed and built haphazardly. This week, however, it stood out from the other thoroughfares round about. Civil Defence Agency trucks, police cars, fire engines and bulldozers jammed into the alleyway; to either side, the crowds that gathered had to be held back with metal barricades. Fate had conspired to give the street name a more contemporary and more painful relevance than the vaguely reverential allusion to a distant past and persons unknown. At 2am last Sunday, without warning, and without second thoughts, building number 89 collapsed, razing itself to the ground in seconds, utterly. It left in its wake seven dead, five missing and presumed dead, five injured and an entire neighbourhood traumatised. "It was midnight when a bulldozer arrived at a small plot of land just beside the building," recounted Mahmoud Kamouna, an eye-witnethe disaster. "The bulldozer pulled down a two-metre-high wall and then started digging a big hole. About 20 minutes before the collapse, a woman in the building next to number 89 started screaming from her balcony, saying that the windows in her house were cracking. The bulldozer finished at 2am and sped off. As it went past, the buildings in the street shook. No sooner had it started moving out, than the building just crumbled." This was the hour of suhur (the last meal before dawn); many people were on the streets and stores were still open. "We heard this indescribable sound. You couldn't see anything because of the dust. For the first 10 minutes, we were paralysed with shock. Then we rushed to help people, and we were able to pull out three bodies and one wounded man, who has had to have his leg amputated," explained Mohamed Fatouh, a young man who lives across the street. What remains of the building now lies in a massive pile at which bulldozers and rescue workers with handsaws have been labouring non-stop since the early hours of Sunday morning. A living room suite sticks out incongruously from amidst the wreckage; over the heads of stunned onlookers, the colourful lanterns and frilly streamers of Ramadan flutter in the breeze, as if unaware of the catastrophe below. Gaping holes in the two buildings next to number 89 warn that there may yet be more destruction to come. Both have been evacuated, and engineers from the Giza Governorate have erected extensive scaffolding to prop them up until a final verdict can be reached on their safety. Police officials now assume that those persons still missing, buried in the rubble, are dead. Rescue and clearance work is scheduled to continue till the end of the week. According to initial reports, it would seem that the owner of the 100-square-metre plot adjacent to number 89 was trying to erect a building behind the governorate's back. That was why he had sent his workmen in at that unearthly hour of the night to start digging the foundations. The bulldozer's driver gouged out a five-metre-deep hole. This was substantially deeper than the foundations of the surrounding buildings, which were thus destabilised. The North Giza District general prosecutor has ordered the arrest of the owner of the unauthorised building site, the owner of building number 89, and the driver of the bulldozer. A committee of architectural specialists from the Faculty of Engineering has been formed to assess the situation and prepare a detailed report on the reasons for the collapse. The fact that most buildings in areas such as Ard Al-Liwa are hazardous is no secret. According to predictions made three years ago by Salah Hassaballah, former minister of housing, three quarters of the buildings across Egypt may well collapse in the course of the next 20 years. The main reason for their dire condition is lack of maintenance. Mohamed Awad, head of the Ouseem City Council, has told the press that most of the buildings in the Ard Al-Liwa area are unlicensed. He added that since Ard Al-Liwa was originally a sewage disposal area, the land is unstable, making the present structures particularly vulnerable. Despite such wider considerations, however, inhabitants of the area have focused their anger on the contractor and the driver. "If the police don't take action against them, someone here will," said one angry onlooker. According to neighbours, the ill-fated six-storey building was home to 10 families. Fortunately, many of them were out of town when the collapse took place, or there could have been many more casualties. A newly-wed couple who live on the fifth floor had luckily been invited out for the night. But Nihad Helmy Iskander, the groom, and his wife are still devastated. "I cannot tell you how difficult it was to get together the LE13,000 we paid for the flat, not to mention the effort and money to fix it up," he wailed. His wife, dressed in black, stood behind him, crying as he talked. They are afraid that all that money is now gone for good, bringing them right back to square one, unable to afford a roof over their heads. Meanwhile, Minister of Social Affairs Mervat El-Tellawi, on President Hosni Mubarak's orders, is to see that each of the families of the deceased receive LE5,000 towards their immediate needs, and LE1,000 for the families of the injured. Although the rubble is slowly being cleared away, the trauma of the collapse of building 89 shows no sign of fading from the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of Martyrs Street. "The people of the street have thrown away the dough they were preparing for Eid El-Kahk [cookies traditionally eaten during the feast after breaking the Ramadan fast]," said Kamouna. "We won't be able to celebrate the Eid this year. It makes you wonder: what does the future hold for us, when we can be the victims of such greed?"
