Friday, August 25, 2006
By Jack Kimball
Areas that experienced painful drought for several months from late 2005 are now suffering deadly flooding caused by abnormally heavy seasonal rains.
Flash floods from overflowing rivers have killed almost 1,000 people and displaced about 120,000 in parts of Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia since early August.
Ethiopia and humanitarian agencies asked for $60.9 million in aid on Friday for nearly 200,000 people affected by the flooding, described by one Ethiopian official as “a nightmare”.
“The current devastating flood problem is the worst that has been observed in a generation,” said Simon Mechale, the head of Ethiopia’s disaster agency.
Cyclical rains have been exacerbated by winds coming from the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and weather systems off the northwest coast of Africa, experts say.
“Depending on the surface temperatures over these oceans, the winds that blow from those areas can be extremely moisture-laden,” Peter Ambenje, assistant director for forecasting at Kenya’s Meteorological Department, told Reuters.
“If the winds are moisture-laden, then we get a lot of rainfall.”
Rains drenching Ethiopia’s highlands have made rivers overflow, causing flooding in the south and east of the country as well as in Sudan, aid agencies said.
“It’s the rainfall on the Ethiopian highlands that is the principal cause of this flooding,” said Steve Penny, coordinator for flood relief for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
“It’s a very, very worrying situation.”
Aid agencies say more rivers are likely to overflow as heavy rains are expected to continue for another month.
Rising levels in Kenya’s northern Lake Turkana have hampered its capacity to absorb excess rain waters flowing through Ethiopian rivers, aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said.
“Lake Turkana is so high right now so the waters that normally come from rivers in Ethiopia can no longer flow into that lake,” said Willem De Jonge, country manager for the Dutch section of MSF.
Ethiopia’s dams and levees are straining to hold the water back and some could burst in the next few weeks, flooding anew the remote south where the Omo River burst its banks two weeks ago and killed 364 people, he added.
Floods have killed at least 27 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Sudan, even threatening government ministries and the Republican Palace in Khartoum.
Tens of thousands of square kilometres of farmland, in a country where most people depend on agriculture, were flooded.
Floods have also hit Somalia, where a girl died on Friday after a river burst its banks in the southern town of Jowhar.
Hundreds of residents were said to be fleeing the area.
“There’s growing fear the flooding will cause displacement as well as diseases such as malaria…it’s already cut off the main road from Jowhar to Mogadishu,” said Cindy Holleman, technical manager for the U.N. Food Security Analysis Unit.
(Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa and Guled Mohamed in Nairobi)
Source: Reuters, Aug 23, 2006
