Sana’a: A generator exploded in a home in a village in Yemen killing 14 people, most of them members of a single family, a provincial official said on Sunday. Eight women were among the dead in the blast, which flattened the two-storey house in the village of Qadam, in Al Mahwit province west of the capital, the official told the state-run Saba news agency.
Four people were also seriously wounded in the explosion which is believed to have been triggered by a short circuit, provincial councillor Alezzi Al Shajjaf said, without specifying when the accident happened. He said that fuel had been stored next to the generator, which had been installed in a small room.
Private generators are widely used in Yemen, where cuts to the mains power supply are frequent. The government blams the power outages on attacks by militants. Yemen is the Arab world’s most impoverished nation and experiences daily electricity outages throughout the summer. The United Nations envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, wrote in a report to the U.N. Security Council in June that Yemen’s electricity problem is causing “misery and anger throughout the country.”
“Families are being plunged into darkness and unbearable heat,” Benomar wrote of the temperatures that often soar to 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit). Some officials have said they suspect tribesmen allied with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh of being behind the attacks in an attempt to undermine the new government. At least five provinces have been without power because of the attacks. While millions of Yemenis do not have electricity in their homes, those that can afford it have had to rely on generators during the summer months. A natural gas and petroleum shortage has made running the generators difficult and expensive. Yemen is rife with insecurity, and an active Al Qaida branch in the country is believed to be trying to overrun parts of the south again, as it did during political turmoil in 2011 that led to Saleh’s resignation.
