Word: cairo
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...Cairo: Life in the City of the Dead
...eastern edge of Cairo (pop. 12 million), a city in which the population density of some areas runs as high as 300,000 per sq. mi. (more than four times the density of Manhattan), there is a huge graveyard known as the City of the Dead. It is dead no longer: several hundred thousand Cairenes have established homes among and even inside the tombs. "It is not like everyone thinks," says Abdullah Mahmoud, 65, who has been living in one of these vaults for 30 years. His wife and six children live there too. "These tombs are bigger than apartments...
...most ways, Cairo's life is about what could be expected in a 1,000-year-old city that had only half a million people at the turn of the century. Bursting water pipes sometimes cause daylong shortages. One-third of Cairo's residents live in buildings that are not connected to any sewage system, and the system that exists was designed for only 2 million people. When it overflowed into homes in Old Cairo two years ago, the breakdown led to serious rioting...
...prevailing winds in Cairo blow north or south. One brings toxic fumes from the lead and zinc smelters in Shubra El Kheima just north of the city. When the wind shifts, it brings poisons from the steel and cement factories in the south, in Helwan. President Gamal Abdel Nasser converted the health resort of Helwan into an industrial showpiece in the late 1950s and 1960s. Today it is notable for its myriad dead trees...
...main cause of Cairo's air pollution, though, is its traffic jams, which are caused not only by swarms of cars, increasing by 15% a year, but also by the 80,000 animal carts that clog the narrow streets and create their own fumes. Carbon monoxide levels in some areas are three to four times what U.S. experts consider dangerous...