Egyptians Await Deliverance After Scourge of Flood, Fire : Mideast: Living in rubble, villagers frustrated at pace of relief. Damage is far worse than originally feared.

More than a week after heavy flash floods swept through southern Egypt, new assessments show damage far worse than originally feared, with more than 36,000 homes destroyed or badly damaged, 151 schools collapsed and 20,975 acres of cropland--the livelihood of thousands of Nile Valley peasants--submerged under the killing waters.

Thousands of villagers with no access to relief camps are living in the rubble of their homes without tents or blankets--some with little more than bread and cheese to eat--and the unburied carcasses of dead cattle threaten water supplies in dozens of villages.

A week after heavy flooding devastated tens of thousands of homes, and after a gasoline fire swept along by storm waters burned its way through the heart of the village of Durunka, killing 402, the next scourge to visit this week has been snakes and scorpions--scurrying in droves down from the rain-washed hills into the villages. More than 50 poisonous stings were reported in one village, Galawiya, on a single day last week.

“Winter is coming on. These people have lost their houses, their water, their crop support systems. This is a disaster in the classic sense,” Pete Bradford, head of a disaster relief team dispatched by the U.S. Agency for International Development, said after a tour of the flood region.

He said the vast majority of the thousands of refugees do not have replacement housing or tent shelter, except what they can find with friends or families, and are likely to remain homeless for at least the next four to six months.

“And that’s in a best-case scenario,” he added.

Frustration at the slow pace of relief supplies has mounted as the stricken in many villages have spent night after night in the chilly autumn air without food or blanket deliveries. The governor of Sohag province, the worst hit by the flooding, was bombarded with catcalls over the weekend when he tried to enter the village of Walad Yehiya al-Hagar, and opposition newspapers reported that five government ministers refused to enter seething villages during a fact-finding visit over the weekend.

The quick delivery of relief supplies is considered crucial in this region of simmering Islamic fundamentalism, the heartland of opposition to the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and the Muslim Brotherhood has moved quietly in recent days to capitalize on the governmental shortfall.

The Brotherhood, a nonviolent opposition organization that is officially outlawed but nonetheless powerful throughout the poorer parts of Egypt, has quietly begun stockpiling clothes, blankets and food and delivering the supplies to the villages most affected despite a government ban on political Islamic relief activities.

“We were worried about collecting and moving and being blamed for using the circumstances to gain political benefits. But we do not trust the government and the executive authorities. Therefore we take charge of taking these donations to the really needy persons,” said Mohammed Habib, a Muslim Brotherhood leader in Assiut, one of the worst hit provinces, about 200 miles south of Cairo.

“But we have learned the lessons of the 1992 earthquake (when the Brotherhood moved far ahead of the government in setting up tent camps), we have not put up any signs or banners that would maybe embarrass the government about its own lack of performance,” Habib said.

Government officials say they have moved as quickly as possible in the face of the unexpected disaster, delivering compensation already to 3,000 families, setting up 27 tent camps and beginning delivery of 47,400 blankets, many of them donated by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and European nations.

The government has pledged to rebuild homes and has already started construction of a new village about a mile away from Durunka.

“Everything we have has been given away already,” said Assiut province spokesman Tarek Abdel Karim Hamadi, dismissing reports that undelivered supplies are stockpiled in warehouses. “This feeling of anger will go away as goods arrive. Now, people are starting to get enough. When the constructors start rebuilding, these feelings also will start to go away.”

In a large number of stricken villages over the weekend, residents camped in the rubble of their homes told stories of being unable to obtain tents or blankets, or being given old army blankets while friends of local ruling party officials stockpiled new donated blankets from the United States and Persian Gulf countries.

Most of those whose relatives perished in the flooding had received cash compensation from the government already (500 Egyptian pounds, or about $150, per victim), but almost no one knew how they would rebuild their collapsed homes or survive without the revenue from this year’s destroyed crops.

In the town of Durunka near Assiut, where floodwaters collapsed several huge fuel storage tanks and sent a flood of burning gasoline sweeping through the heart of town, a number of families were still living in the cinders and piled mud bricks of their homes more than a week later because they had nowhere else to go.

“What did the government do for us when all the young people died, all our crops are gone, our houses destroyed? What did we get? Five hundred pounds and a burial permit,” said Mohammed Ashour Eissa, 29, who escaped with his wife and three children but lost 115 other extended family members in Durunka. Both his home and a new home he was building were destroyed, as were his farm fields.

“Please say these words for me to President Hosni Mubarak,” he said. “We have lost everything, and we have not received any compensation. What are we afraid of? There’s nothing for us to fear anymore. What am I going to be afraid of after I lost everything? I only fear God.”

Nearby, grocer Sayed Mohammed Mohammed Saleh was shoveling foul-smelling sludge from the inside of the shop he has owned in Durunka for 30 years. After losing his wife, son and two nephews to the fire, Saleh is still living in the ruins of his shop and the house above it and looking for the 1,000 Egyptian pounds and stores of lentils, peanuts, sugar and rice he had in the shop when the flood and fire swept in.

“This is what’s left of it,” he said in disgust, holding up two mud-caked five- and 10-pound notes.

“We went to the government and requested they come and check the damage. They came the next morning and wrote a report, but after that they did nothing,” Saleh said. “Of course I have to wait for their help. What else can I do? But should I go to the government ahead of everyone else and say find some money and give me some? I’m just like all the others. I need everything. And they will never give us everything.”

In the province of Sohag, south of Assiut, some villages are so devastated that hardly a single home is left intact. Villagers mill angrily in the streets all day long waiting for help that still had not arrived, more than nine days after the flood.

In Galawiya, a cluster of seven farming villages on the north end of Sohag, 2,000 acres out of 2,400 acres of farmland were destroyed. Out of 350 homes destroyed and 250 others badly damaged, tents were set up for 36 families as of the weekend. Eight days after the disaster, they had received 500 pieces of bread and a large can of cheese.

The village medical unit recorded 50 scorpion stings in a single day last week.

“When the water came, you could see them falling off the hills with the water: snakes, scorpions and toraisha (Gila monster-like reptiles),” said a soldier guarding the entrance to the village.

A representative of the government-appointed social affairs committee in the village, who asked not to be identified, said that about 1,200 homes in the area are uninhabitable. More would have been saved except that the government delayed unblocking a nearby irrigation canal, and villagers finally had to break through the road adjoining the canal themselves with picks and shovels at 1 o’clock in the morning, he said.

“We did not get any assistance at all until the third day. And the neglect of the officials here is what led to this,” said the man, a schoolteacher. He said local irrigation officials, fearing blame themselves, had initially reported that the local canal was clear.

In the village of Al-Hagr nearby, fights broke out over the weekend during one of the first food distributions, and several people were injured.

About 411 families have been left homeless in this village of 4,000, where flooding also swept away grain-storage domes full of food for this year and seeds for next year’s planting.

“What the government could give us, it gave us. We started getting help on the fourth day,” said Kamel Abdin Abdullah, local representative of the ruling National Democratic Party. “But generally speaking, it is not enough. Most of us are not wealthy people. We are very simple peasants. Most of us are day laborers in the fields; we earn maybe 3 pounds (about 90 cents) a day. There’s no way we can rebuild ourselves.”

Farther south in Walad Yehiya al-Hagar, the majority of the homes in the village were destroyed, as were the mosque and all the schools. Sohag Gov. Mohammed Tantawi, who had initially reported only minor damage in Sohag, was verbally assaulted a few days ago when he tried to visit.

“People say he was beaten. He was not hit, but people said things like ‘Fire the governor’ and ‘God will be our assistant,’ ” recounted Ahmed Hassan, one of those who lost a house. “As you can see, the town is nothing but a heap of dust and mud. Ninety-nine percent of the village is gone. Now we are asking, how are they going to fix it? Now we want to know, is it real or imaginary, this help the government says it’s going to give us?”

Habib, the Muslim Brotherhood representative, sat among boxes of donated clothes, candy bars and blankets piled in the faculty headquarters of Assiut University. He said the government is to be blamed for allowing mass-scale building of mud-brick houses in known flood plains, and then for underreporting the damage initially because local officials were afraid to be blamed.

“The government doesn’t want to show the size of the damage so it won’t show its own incompetence and mistakes,” Habib said. “In the shade of dictatorships, responsible people do not want to take charge because of fears of reprisals or punishments. . . . Now, it is clear that the people of these areas are in a state of loss, and the ministers are afraid.”