The flooded housewives of Dubai: Chanel underwater, supercars swept away and mega

Release time：2024-05-21 06:59:49 Source：Cultural Caravan news portal

Dubai is the glitzy desert city state famous for its endless sunshine, as well as the influencers, footballers and reality TV stars who flock there to lounge in luxury hotels and upload photographs onto their social media accounts.

So few anticipated the apocalyptic storms last Tuesday when a year's worth of rain fell in 12 hours flat.

Caroline Stanbury, privately-educated British socialite turned star of the Real Housewives of Dubai reality show, certainly didn't.

'Nobody understood what was about to happen,' she tells me. 'We were oblivious. I had a dinner party planned for 15 people that night and everybody was, like, 'we're still coming', but you couldn't get down the road.

'When you see the water flowing like [water from] taps into all the luxury shops – Chanel, Dior all of them are affected – and the cars, sports cars, floating down the streets, you realise how bad it was.

'Chanel , Dior all of them are affected – and the cars, sports cars, floating down the streets, you realise how bad it was' says Dubai Houswife  Caroline Stanbury

This Ferrari faces being written off after being flooded 

One of her social media posts captures the ferocity of the storm

'I think the point here is it doesn't matter who you are or what you are, you can't avoid a natural disaster.

'It's not like really rich people here are sitting on a mountain somewhere in their house and are absolutely fine. Everybody was affected by this.'

Her own experience in her recently acquired £3.2 million five-bedroomed 'modern, all-glass, LA style' luxury home began Tuesday morning, though thankfully she had staff on hand to help.

'When it started about 8am I came downstairs and there was water pouring out of my plug sockets which was kind of scary,' she recalls.

'I could hear it behind the marble in the kitchen. It sounded like a tap.

'It was very weird. My kitchen was new because I'd just moved in. I took all the wood stuff underneath off [the plinths] because I was worried about it swelling.'

We're speaking on Zoom, with Caroline in her office which was thankfully unaffected by the floods, with its art works on the walls and one of those room perfumes with scented sticks on the shelf. The kitchen, it seems, was worst hit. I ask her to describe it.

'Bespoke marble fitted kitchen,' she says with a wave of her hand. 'Grey and Miele [appliances]. Beautifully done. I don't know how to describe it.

'I don't spend much time in there. We had about a foot of water coming in. My driver was here. My housekeeper helped. We had things to push the water out of the door.' 

Mops? 'They looked like windscreen wipers,' she says. 'It was all hands on deck. Everybody was running around with towels.

'We got weather warnings all the way through. So we'd have a really big downpour then there was like an hour to three hours to get the towels back into the driers and spin them around.'

'I was super lucky,' she says. 'Some people didn't have electricity. These houses aren't built for a year's rain in a day so nobody had enough towels, but we were spinning ours around in the drier.

'The water was coming through the windows. It was coming through ceilings. It was coming through doors.'

Caroline seems relieved to have secured some supplies from her local Waitrose - which says is struggling to stay well-stocked in the fallout from the storm

Caroline Stanbury and her husband Sergio Carrallo. She moved to Dubai nine years ago.

A sportscar is stranded as the rain pelts down, turning the roads into a river

She adds: 'I don't know how I thought about it, but I noticed my pool was about this high after the first wave [of the storm].' She puts her manicured finger and thumb together with an inch or so gap.

'So I called my gardeners to come before it got really bad and drain it. Once I put it on my Instagram everyone else saw it but it was too late [for them] because no one was allowed to travel by then, for their own safety, so the workers weren't really allowed to come in and help you anymore.'

The storm continued on and off until 10pm that night.

'The thunder was incredible too. I don't know if you've heard it on my Instagram, but the noise was insane.'

Ah yes. Social media. Being a very modern personality, Caroline inevitably charted the experience for her 694,000 Instagram followers and 321,000 viewers on TikTok, including a tongue-in-cheek film poking fun at what was happening to her, which she promptly took down when she realised it was more serious than she'd initially thought and insists was just British 'there's a catastrophe go and have a cup of tea' humour.

While the sun is once again shining - Caroline swivels her computer around to show me the sunshine and a clear blue sky - she says life is still not normal.

'Everything is at a standstill now. A journey that should take you ten minutes takes two, three hours,' she explains.

'On top of everything else, all the kids are being home schooled until Monday while the authorities work to get everything running safely again.

'We're all stuck in our houses really. No one's going anywhere - but I'm sure we will soon.

'We've got one small Waitrose here which is running out fast.

'But I feel very blessed that everyone in our close-knit community is pulling together.

'It's completely private so you can take a golf cart up onto the pavement to get to what you need to.

Shocking videos shared on social media showed how cars were filled with water, forcing hundreds of motorists to abandon their vehicles and swim to safety

People wade through submerged streets after abandoning their vehicles

'We have a dentist, a doctor's, hair, food, so we have everything we need.'

Certainly, she's very appreciative that she is one of the luckier ones.

'Clearing up the aftermath is going to take time. I look at other houses that had much more damage than mine and there's nothing left. I'm... I know, super-lucky.

'I feel super-blessed because there's nothing I can't repair with a good dry cleaner and paint.

'One of my girlfriends got really, badly hit. Her house was about four feet under water. It was nuts and very scary when you've got young children.

'Other girlfriends lost their offices. The roofs have fallen down. Their cars are ruined because the water literally came up to window level.

'One of my friend's sons had to walk three hours to get home because there were no taxis or cars. Nothing. But considering how much rain fell in such a short time, disruption is not surprising.

A social media post shows rainwater crashing through a shopping mall in Dubai  

A ceiling collapses under the sheer volume of the rainfall

A luxury apartment complex is partially submerged a day after the storm

'We were super lucky. Literally one street over the main road is like a river [flooding] into people's houses [down] all the steps. You can't get in. That was the house I was renting before I built this one.

'As you'd expect, anyone with rooms below ground level is really struggling. They build a lot with TV rooms and gyms downstairs which are now three feet under water.'

Caroline, a 47-year-old with three children by her ex-husband who is now married to former Real Madrid footballer Sergio Carrallo, 18-years her junior, moved here nine years ago.

She tells me Dubai has given her 'the most incredible opportunities'. As well as her Instagram following and Real Housewives of Dubai star turn there have been over seven million downloads of her podcast Uncut and Uncensored.

'I love Dubai,' she says. 'It's a place that completely embraced me because I was very different to everybody else. I was English.

'I was on TV [she appeared on American reality TV series Ladies of London which ended in 2017] when they didn't really have any reality TV shows here.

'Now we have Bling and Dubai Housewives [the second series of which begins in June] but it's very new for them. They didn't really have people like that [me] living here. It's afforded me a great, great lifestyle.

Caroline married former Real Madrid footballer Sergio Carrallo, who is 18-years her junior, two years ago

Caroline says that after all her friends questioned her decision to move to Dubai, they are now moving there too in what she describes as a 'mass exodus'

'On top of that there's the weather.' She pauses. 'I've been here nine years and never seen anything like this – ever.'

Caroline is the daughter of venture capitalist Anthony and his wife Elizabeth who was part of the rather posh Vestey family and an old friend of the Duchess of York's father, Major Ron Ferguson.

She was educated at the prestigious Westonbirt School in Gloucestershire and had beaus including Prince Andrew and footballer Ryan Giggs, before marrying investment banker Cem Habib in 2004 with whom she has twin 14-year-old sons Aaron and Zac and a daughter Yasmine, 16. She's been married to Carrallo for two years now.

When she first ventured into reality TV land with Ladies of London in 2014 her parents, she tells me, were horrified.

'I don't think any parent goes, 'yippee this is amazing'. Especially, when they're very old English.

'My mother's first reaction was, 'Don't tell your grandmother it will kill her'. As soon as she said that my reaction was, 'I'm going straight over there to let her know.' I'm a very big sort of bull in a china shop person. I won't be told what to do by anyone.'

'People will take things as they want to take them. I've got, at this point, a rhino skin.

'You're not going to please everyone ever. That's just a fact. You can't spend your life in this business worrying.'

This business? 'It [social media] is a big business. It's not just for fun. I'm not sitting here running around doing stuff for fun. I'm a TV star. It's all an ecosystem of a massive business behind what we do,' she says.

She explains her positive experiences in Dubai have inspired others to join her.

'It's so beautiful here. When I first came here all my London friends said, 'Oh, my God, what are you doing?' Now they're moving to Dubai. I can't tell you how many in the last month. It's like a mass exodus.

'The weather in England is so gloomy but here… OK we've had a couple of bad days.

'Dubai is the number one tourist destination with 17million visitors last year for a reason. Everybody is coming here because of the weather, the lifestyle, the safety... and that is something a day of storms won't change.'

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