ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Torrential rains last month have destroyed bridges and pedestrian roads connecting three villages with the rest of northern Erbil province’s Sidakan town and surrounding areas, forcing local villagers to build unreliable cable cars for traffic.
The remote village of Duramulk on the outskirts of Sidakan, around 140 kilometers northeast of Erbil near the Iranian border, is only accessible by a cable car built by locals.
Most of the village’s daily traffic is through a simple cable car rigged across a river separating the village from Sidakan’s other outlying villages.
The cable car moves across the river by pulling a rope with both ends tied to two trees on both sides of the river. Villagers have no choice but to use the unreliable cable car every day.
"Traffic to and from this village is done through this strand rope. If we lose this, then we will have to use Shiwan road to reach Soran, which is very far," Siddiq Mohammed, a local villager, told Rudaw on Tuesday.
"Some people who wanted to visit the village did not care to come [using the cable car]. Imagine if a student or a child fell in the water and drowned. Nothing is worth doing after that if such things happen,” he stressed.
The neighboring Horaysa village also had its bridges destroyed by the torrential rains, and a month later, no vehicle has reached the village.
"The flood destroyed all the roads. Look, these are the remains of the bridge. During the flooding, the water level increased up there, washing away everything, all the roads," said Farhad Mohammed, a local villager in Horaysa village.
Local authorities in Sidakan have finished assessing the scale of the damages to start repairing the bridges.
"We have finished assessing the damages and already submitted it to the authorities in Soran to approve them so the repair could start and check other damages done to the Sidakan roads due to the floods, estimated at 130 million dinars," Khusrat Sadiq, a local official in Sidakan said. "The damages of course increase due to the collapse of the vehicle and pedestrian bridges"
Heavy rainfall in mid-January overflew the rivers in Erbil province’s Soran district and damaged them, with an estimated 458 millimeters of rainfall reported in the district.