Ravaged by months of war, Yemen is now being battered by the first tropical storm on record to make landfall in the impoverished Arab country.
Tropical Cyclone Chapala slammed into Yemen's central coast early Tuesday, lashing the area with maximum sustained winds of around 140 kph (85 mph).
But the major concern is the extraordinary volume of rain the storm is expected to dump on the country's dry, rugged terrain, bringing a severe threat of mudslides.
Yemen typically gets around 100 millimeters (4 inches) of rain per year. Chapala is forecast to unleash two to three times that amount in the space of just one day.
The deluge is likely to cause "massive debris flows and flash flooding," CNN meteorologist Tom Sater warned.
The storm made landfall not far from Al Mukalla, a port that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seizedearlier this year amid the chaotic conflict engulfing Yemen.
'We have no one to help us'
The country isn't used to finding itself in the path of tropical cyclones.
Reliable records, which only go back about 30 years, show no landfalls by hurricane-strength tropical cyclones in Yemen. Chapala, which was the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane early Tuesday, had at one point been the second strongest storm ever recorded in the Arabian Sea
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