It was the sixth day of Ramadan, September 6, and the whole of Duweiqa shantytown was still asleep. It was quiet. However, at about 7am, the silence was violently broken as homes were crushed by boulders falling on the low brick ceilings, a steady stream of dust invading residents’ broken windows. With the noise of the landslide, some people — the lucky ones — ran outside their homes to look around, trying to figure out what was happening. However, the majority didn’t move from their shacks — they were still asleep. And now their bodies lie buried in their beds under the huge rocks that fell when the side of Moqattam Mountain collapsed.

The neighborhood of Duweiqa, known officially as Manshiet Nasser, is situated to the east of the Maadi-Heliopolis Autostrad. It is one of the most desperately poor and crowded shantytowns in Egypt: On the side of the mountain, more than 300,000 tiny houses have been built since the 1960s without any sort of regulation from the authorities. An estimated 1.2 million people live there with no sewage treatment system, few paved roads, and illegal electricity and water access. The area, despite its near-complete lack of government attention, has 26 schools and a central telephone exchange.

Nearly 100 meters from the main entrance to the town, hours after the disaster, media correspondents are given the roof of one of the unharmed houses to sit and observe from a distance. Also on the roof, Independent Member of Parliament Moustafa Bakry, wearing a navy striped suit, is looking shocked and watching the only ambulance stopping some 200 meters from the site, unable to pass through the narrow makeshift alleys.

“This is mere carelessness from the government,” Bakry says. “[How could] any government officer see this shanty house and leave it as it is?” Walking down from the roof, he continues, “many incidents happened in Duweiqa before; this happened in 1994 and no one moved. [The authorities] knew they had to evacuate [the residents], but they didn’t.” The 1994 rockslide killed an estimated 30 people.

The dusty alley leading to the crushed houses is crowded with hundreds if not thousands of people. It is also blocked by a railway line built up on a three-meter high concrete platform. Survivors and onlookers are standing on the raised platform, watching the aftermath of the disaster unfold. The railway itself blocks all rescue machinery from reaching the scene until that evening.

Associated Press Duweiqa residents spent hours digging before rescue workers arrived.

On the other side of the tracks, women wearing black galabeyyas are sitting on the ground screaming and calling the names of loved ones known to be dead or still missing. Doors to the remaining homes are open and chairs placed out to seat those still in shock. Speaking into his walkie-talkie, a Civil Defense Forces general is asking for more ambulances than the sole vehicle available. At the same time, a group of 10 or more young men are shouting loudly at people to get out of their way as they run past with the stretcher from the ambulance. They are trying their best, but it is too late. The tiny body wrapped in a blanket on the stretcher is not moving.

A high-ranking military officer stands nearby with a group of younger officers talking about the disaster. They turn out to be the group of engineers the military sent to help the rescue workers; the ranking officer agrees to explain the cause of the landslide on the condition of anonymity. “This is a limestone mountain, with no sewage treatment system. People throw their sewage in vertical wells inside the mountain. Can you imagine a piece of chalk in a cup of water? This is exactly what happened here.”

It is a ‘lucky’ day for Nadia, 35, a divorced woman with three children. Her family was invited for dinner with her sister the day before; after the meal, Nadia’s sister insisted that it was too late for them to return home and that the family should stay the night. When Nadia returned to her house the next morning, she found nothing but a five-story-high boulder covering her neighbors’ homes and her own. “Thank God I was not there,” Nadia says. “But where should I live now? I need a shelter, or the children and I will live in the street.”

A few meters down the alley, in their black uniforms and full emergency gear, riot police are preventing people from getting too close, journalists in particular. A fight breaks out between the local rescuers and riot police as some of the police try to block the young men from returning to the scene. The fight comes to nothing as the volunteers manage to jump over the soldiers, getting through to the wreckage.

AP Photo Frustrated with the slow emergency response, locals took matters into their own hands.

When the volunteers see that the journalists are being obstructed, Ali Bekheet, in his early 30s, guides the reporters through a twisted path left unattended by the police. He grabs one of the men sitting beside the wall and tells him to talk to the journalists, yelling at him, “Talk, and let them know what happened. Tell them where your wife is now, and what you are doing here.”

The man is Mohamed Ali, who came a few years ago from Upper Egypt with his four children and his wife to find a job here as a construction worker. Hanging his head, he says he does not know if his wife will live. “She woke me up this morning holding a small rock in her hand, shouting: ‘Mohamed, the house is falling.’ Quickly, I grabbed the kids and ran out [] but the wall fell on her.” The construction worker left his wife at the hospital and the children at a friend’s home, and came back to try and help rescue his neighbors.

Many of the survivors were brought to El-Zahraa Hospital in Abbassiya and El-Hussein Hospital. At El-Zahraa, undertakers’ cars wait ominously in a long line outside the hospital. Families sit and wait in complete silence. They are not crying or screaming — it is as if they have accepted their fate.

Dressed in a dusty yellow t-shirt and torn shorts, Ahmed Samir, 23, is crying silently on the floor of the surgery section. His mother is dead and his sister is still in surgery, barely clinging to life. He waves his hands to a journalist to go away, shouting, “enough, it is my mum and my sister, enough” and then breaking into tears again. At this point, security asks all journalists to clear the floor.

The first day, the death toll reached 32. Ten days later, with volunteers and rescue workers using only basic tools to reach the people underneath the rocks, it reached 92, and officials could only guess how many people remained under the rubble. The government claimed 12. The Manshiet Nasser local council said 180. It is still unknown how many have died, but hundreds may still be buried.

Rescue efforts continued into the evening on the first day, and by 7pm the army had managed to dig a hole in the railway platform large enough to allow heavy machinery to reach the site. However, the loaders and excavators that were sent could not be used for fear that they might crush the rocks on the people still buried below, or that the vibrations would trigger another slide.

Rescue workers labored in shifts trying to break the stones, but in vain — some are estimated to weigh 70 or more tons, and cover tens of houses. Every now and then, a group of volunteers would run through the debris with another covered body or badly injured victim, accompanied by heart-breaking screams.

Many have condemned the government response as slow and inefficient. Rescue workers were few, and the authorities were often unable to control the situation, to such an extent that Duweiqa residents pelted Cairo Governor Abdel-Azeem Wazir with stones when he visited. On the daily TV program Al-Qahira Al-Youm, the governor admitted that the area should have been evacuated but denied that the government was responsible for the loss of life.

People who lost their houses were moved into an army camp in El-Fustat Park. Later that day, Al-Qahirah Al-Youm aired scenes from a report prepared in January, in which it exposed the dangerous situation at Moqattam, asking that the authorities address it. Residents in the report complained that they were promised newly-built apartments by the governments, but the promise had gone undelivered.

For weeks after the disaster, the discovery of a decomposed body was a normal occurrence. Inciting a scream or two, and then everything would become quiet again. The dust may have settled, but September 6 is a day people will never forget — the pictures, the screams and the chaos will remain vivid in people’s minds. And one image will remain sharper than others: Among the debris of the shanty town, a woman screams, “oh, God, oh God, your mercy,” and hysterically she says, “but where is God, where is He here?” et