Ras Ghareb Gets Water Tankers, a Loader and Backup Generators as the Red Sea Braces for Rain

Red Sea Governorate has raised emergency readiness across all its cities ahead of the rain and flash-flood season, with the sharpest focus this week on Ras Ghareb, where inspection teams checked flood channels, canals and earth barriers, according to Sada El-Balad.

Governor Walid El-Barqi ordered every city to confirm that rapid-intervention equipment is ready to move and told operations rooms to stay staffed around the clock. Clearing and maintenance of flood channels, canals and water structures is continuing, along with the removal of anything blocking the paths water takes when it runs off the hills.

The inspection was led by Mohamed Abdel Hamid Riad, joined by crisis official Ahmed Mohamed Abdel Sadek and representatives of the groundwater authority and the General Authority for Roads and Bridges. The team examined the artificial canal running alongside Ras Ghareb — 12.4 kilometres long, 20 metres wide and four metres deep — together with the earth barrier behind it.

The committee also reviewed three protection schemes in the desert west of the coast:

• Flood protection at St Paul's Monastery, reported 61 percent complete
• Protection works at St Anthony's Monastery, at 65 percent
• A scheme of five artificial lakes with eight earth barriers built behind them

On the roads, the team reviewed upgrade works on the Ras Ghareb–Zafarana road and checked the guide barriers along the Ras Ghareb–Sheikh Fadl road, the ring road and the Zafarana road, to confirm nothing obstructs either the flood paths or traffic. The governor separately ordered faster work at Ras Shukeir.

Ras Ghareb's local unit is to be supplied with water-suction tankers, a loader and a four-wheel-drive vehicle for crisis management. El-Barqi also ordered backup generators so sewage lifting and pumping stations keep running during an outage, and requested a financial allocation to build storm-drainage chambers, known locally as shanayesh.

Sada El-Balad gives no completion date for the monastery works, no cost for the equipment and no figure for the drainage funding requested. For anyone driving north, the practical detail is that the Zafarana road — the main land link towards Suez and Cairo — is among the stretches being worked on as the season starts. Hurghada checked its own flood defences earlier this week, and the governorate counted 115 completed flood defences across the coast at the end of last week.