Severe floods hit 17 countries in Africa

[Jahness]

Severe floods hit 17 countries in Africa

By KATY POWNALL,
Associated Press Writer
Wed Sep 19, 3:26 PM ET

Fish swam alongside the dugout canoes residents were using to flee their flooded homes, riding the water gushing through the streets of this town in eastern Uganda.

Across Africa, torrential downpours and flash floods have submerged whole towns and washed away bridges, farms and schools. More than a million people have been affected by the rains since the summer, according to the United Nations. At least 200 people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands displaced in 17 countries.

In Uganda, one of the hardest-hit, humanitarian workers were trying to reach villages that have been cut off by water amid warnings of food crises and a rising risk of disease outbreaks.

"I've lost everything," Martha Amongin, 56, told The Associated Press on Wednesday in Magoro, a town in eastern Uganda that is surrounded by floodwater and has become inaccessible by road. "Life is going to be bad."

Driving rain pounded Amongin's hut for days until the structure gave way, disintegrating into a pile of mud and burying everything inside.

The only route out of Magoro to reach a hospital or market is by helicopter, boat or wading through waist-high water for three miles. Earlier this week, the water was chest-deep, and residents said one person drowned trying to make the crossing.

Richard Okello uses his canoe to ferry people across the murky water.

"Some people are scared to get in the boat, they don't know water and they have never used a boat before," he said. "But what choice do they have?"

Indeed, Ugandans haven't seen floodwaters like this in more than 35 years, a disaster Amongin remembers well.

That time, at least, "the floods happened after we harvested our crops," she said from her new home — a mud hut much like her last one, but shared with 20 people instead of four.

This time, Amongin's cassava, potato and groundnut crops were washed away. "Now, we have nothing," the mother of two said.

The water also has brought much of Soroti, a 20-minute helicopter ride from Magoro, to a standstill.

When Soroti is dry, the roads are potholed but passable, and bicycles and buses are the best way to get around. Maize and cotton dot the landscape.

But the floods have washed out roads and crops during a potentially lucrative harvest season. Traffic police are stationed along high roads, urging vehicles to turn back. Bicycles are stuck in the sticky mud.

Other affected countries include Somalia, which is struggling to quell an insurgency and to recover from a seemingly endless cycle of drought and flood.

Interior Minister Mohamed Mohamud Guled said this week that southern Somalia faced a "humanitarian catastrophe," because rivers had burst their banks, flooding farms and destroying crops. The rivers began flooding in late August following heavy rains in neighboring Ethiopia, he said.

On the other side of the continent, Ghana has also been heavily hit. Three regions in the north, the country's traditional breadbasket, have been declared an official disaster zone after whole towns and villages were submerged. Torrential rains between July and August killed at least 32 people and displaced a quarter of a million, the U.N. said.

Humanitarian workers are struggling to reach the neediest.

Tesema Negash, the World Food Program's country director in Uganda, said it was impossible to trust the weather.

"It's a beautiful day today but we don't know what tomorrow brings," Negash said, speaking under a clear, blue sky — just hours before the clouds descended again, sending a deluge of rain onto a drenched landscape.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070919/...qsjOxtLF2ROrgF

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.

[Jahness]

Africa flood crisis sweeps Nigeria and Burkina



Floods that have made hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said Thursday.

Nigeria's Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22,000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states of the most populous nation in Africa as well as in the Lagos area, the huge economic capital in the southwest.

The minister of social action and national solidarity in landlocked Burkina Faso, one of west Africa's poorest nations, said 33 people had been killed over a similar period and almost 7,500 homes had been destroyed.

Further to the north, administrative officials in Algeria reported 13 deaths in violent storms and flash floods at the end of last week, which swamped parts of districts inland from the Mediterranean coast.

These figures come in the wake of a warning by aid agencies on Tuesday that neither they nor the governments in 22 African countries can cope with further rains and a humanitarian crisis that has affected at least 1.5 million people from one side of the continent to the other.

The floods of 2007 are the worst in 30 years, according to weather experts, and they have hit all the harder in a stretch of Africa across from Sudan, the most seriously affected nation in the east, to the sub-Saharan nations of the west where people, their crops and the soil have been more accustomed to cycles of drought.

In Algeria alone, officials on Thursday said that the cost of damage caused on just last Friday and Saturday was estimated at 21 million euros (30 million dollars).

"The rains have never been as heavy as this," Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa told AFP in Nigeria on Thursday. "Even now, in most of the 10 states the rains are still pouring down heavily, so we are really worried that more people might be displaced or affected."

In many nations like Nigeria, victims are living in makeshift camps or have managed to take refuge with relatives and friends, but the floods also mean a lack of fresh water and the risk of highly contagious water-borne diseases and malaria.

Burkina's Social Action Minister Pascaline Tamini said that crops had been lost over a third of the flooded 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres), while 40,000 people had been displaced and about 100 seriously injured.

"We don't know how many households won't be able to harvest or have lost their cereal reserves," she added, while the administration had no tents to shelter the homeless until Morocco offered to send 400, and the United States, he UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) came up with emergency aid to meet immediate needs worth more than 180,000 euros between them.

As in other countries, local people have also some readiness to meet a call for national solidarity with the afflicted. In Sudan, which is Africa's biggest country, the United Nations reckons that up to 625,000 people need emergency relief and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) this week announced air drops from next month.

Wealthy European Union countries and the United States have pledged millions of euros and dollars to assist, while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on Tuesday said that it will spend the full extent of its resources, totalling 12 million dollars.

Heavy rains have been for decades part of regular life in August and September, but African government officials this year made no bones about telling the current United Nations General Assembly that the torrential downpours and floods are a wake-up call to climate change.

World leaders have been discussing this globally key issue at the UN General Assembly in New York, while some scientific experts have linked the floods to a weather pattern known as "La Nina", which occurs thousands of kilometres (miles) away in the Pacific Ocean.

The inaccessability of many areas makes it difficult to assess the human cost of the floods in countries such as Ghana, but figures based on reports by hospital, government and humanitarian sources and compiled by AFP put the toll above 300, while infrastructure damage across Africa is incalculable.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070927/sc_afp/africaflood

Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse.