Until the November 25 flood submerged homes and roads, killing at least 120 people, every day a line of tanker trucks made their way from Jeddah, a city of 2.6 million with almost no municipal sewerage system, to Musk Lake in the hills 12 kilometres (seven miles) to the east to dump fetid loads of human waste.

Last month's deadly flood showed what could happen.

Ninety millimetres (3.5 inches) of heavy rain falling on non-absorbent desert soils turned into what some residents called a tsunami-like wave that rolled into Jeddah, overwhelming its limited storm drainage system.

Spillways constructed long ago were already overbuilt with housing, exacerbating the disaster.

Now, every day, Abdullah Saad keeps one eye on the cloudy sky over his home in the Samer district just east of the city, where he lives with his wife and four children.

"Samer is just 12 kilometres from the lake, and if it rains heavily we will leave the neighborhood to protect ourselves from the sewage," he said.

"We have seen the death and destruction of nearby neighbourhoods and we are afraid of rain, not to mention the putrid water."

The reservoir -- ironically named by locals after the perfume ingredient -- has posed a threat to the city for 20 years, said Ali Ishdi, a professor of ecology at Jeddah's King Abdul Aziz University, itself badly damaged by last month's floods.

The lake is crucial as the city, Saudi Arabia's second largest, is covered only to a minor extent by a sewerage system.

Two earthen dams hold back Musk Lake's 45 million cubic metres (one and a half billion cubic feet) of sludge, and they have been leaking at least since the November downpour raised liquid levels to the brim.

Musk was originally the responsibility of the state-owned National Water Company.

But the city began using it to get rid of waste, said city official Ibrahim Kutubkhana, because otherwise tanker drivers were dumping some 50,000 cubic metres a day of sewage anywhere they could, including into the Red Sea.

"So we moved to organise the process, and set up a temporary location (Musk Lake) to dispose of the waste until the water company could complete a sewage network."

But the city has been extremely slow to do so.

On the plus side, however, a wastewater treatment plant has come on-stream in the past few months and tanker trucks are now being directed to it.

A pipeline has also begun vacuuming off some of the lake's contents to deliver to the plant, and a third embankment is being built at the lake to hold back the excess.

Liquid-absorbing vegetation is also being planted around the lake to help reduce the levels.

But nervous residents of nearby Jeddah are still carefully monitoring the weather, fearing that the next inundation could be more than just rainwater.

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