CAIRO — Hind Hussein returned from the hospital after going into false labor and was nodding off early Saturday morning when the cliff above her shantytown rumbled and boulders the size of tugboats rained down, crushing scores of apartments and houses in a storm of grit and dust.
Hussein and a few neighbors ran for cover in a mosque, but for many the rock slide that roared through a quiet Ramadan morning erupted too quickly. At least 24 people have been reported dead and dozens injured. Residents in the crowded Douaiqa slum in east Cairo said hundreds were missing beneath rocks and splintered houses.
"The government is not doing anything to rescue the people," Hussein said, standing on a battered terrain that was once a neighborhood as friends and families clawed through debris to get to loved ones.
"The government is just watching. Some people are still alive in there. We hear them shout and ask for help. Some are even calling us from mobile phones."
By dusk, whole families were unaccounted for. Men and women covered in dust and sweat pushed at immovable rock, listening for survivors in an eerie vigil punctuated by rising anger at the government.
Rescue crews from the national civil defense agency arrived hours after the slide, and the people of the shantytown said authorities were ignoring the poor.
"While we were digging to rescue people, the civil defense personnel were just watching us and doing nothing," said Ghareeb Atayya, who spent hours searching for his neighbors. "We have been rescuing babies, old men and women. I rescued around seven people and not all of them were still alive."
Many Egyptians view the government of President Hosni Mubarak as negligent, corrupt and incompetent in its handling of crises. In August, a palace that houses the upper chamber of parliament was gutted by fire because the emergency response was so poorly executed. In July, a court acquitted a Mubarak-appointed lawmaker charged in the deaths of 1,000 people who drowned in 2006 when an unsafe ferry he owned sank in the Red Sea.
Such headlines have become national embarrassments and have further agitated a population that is enduring joblessness, a persistent high inflation rate and a government that silences and imprisons members of opposition political parties.
In a country where 45% of the people live on less than $2 a day, workers of all stripes protest in the streets for higher wages, and a widening chorus of activist bloggers has begun campaigns against the ruling National Democratic Party.
