Deadly floods, disease afflict Africa's arid Sahel
Pastor Dale Morgan
Deadly floods, disease afflict Africa's arid Sahel*
By Alistair Thomson
Reuters
Wednesday, August 15, 2007; 11:16 AM
DAKAR (Reuters) - A few weeks ago farmers in parts of Africa's arid
Sahel region were fretting that late rains had failed their crops.
Now many are struggling to survive after downpours swept away food
stocks, destroyed thousands of homes and killed well over 100 people
across the Sahel, which stretches from Senegal on the Atlantic seaboard
to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
"This country is a paradox. Floods are just one of the natural disasters
which hit it regularly, after bush fires and drought," said Hamani
Harouna, head of the national humanitarian Early Warning System in
impoverished Niger, at the heart of the Sahel.
Last month, farmers in nearby Ivory Coast were complaining seasonal
rains had failed to arrive on time, meaning seeds had not germinated and
key crops such as cotton were under threat.
Since then there has been a deluge.
Scientists have told the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change that rising temperatures around the world will contribute
to changing weather patterns in the Sahel.
Some have fingered global warming as a factor behind extreme
temperatures, storms and drought around the world this year.
In Sudan, Africa's biggest country and the worst affected by recent
weather, floods have carried away or drowned more than 70 people since
the rains began -- which in Sudan's case came earlier than usual.
"The rains started at the very beginning of July. Normally they start a
bit later with this intensity," Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for U.N.
humanitarian coordinator OCHA, told Reuters.
At least 365,000 people there have lost food stocks, possessions or part
of their home, including 50,000 whose homes were completely destroyed,
OCHA said.
DISEASE
The agency expects further rainfall and flooding will affect 265,000
more people in the coming weeks, while flood waters have contaminated
water sources and spread cholera, bringing the death toll from the
water-borne disease to 53 this rainy season, according to the World
Health Organisation.
"We have to be prepared for the worst possible scenario," Giuliano said.
In neighboring Chad, violent rain storms last weekend destroyed hundreds
of homes and killed thousands of livestock -- the main form of wealth
for many of the region's farming and nomadic peoples.
"It's a disastrous situation. Lots of people have taken refuge in trees
or in schools -- those which were not flattened," Bakary Tchaksam, a
journalist working a local radio station in southwestern Chad, told Reuters.
"This is the first time anything like this has happened here. There's a
sense of being powerless," he said.
After a late start in western parts of the Sahel, the sheer force of the
rain storms took people by surprise.
Mud houses, which are cheap and practical during the dry season and
generally survive the rains with a few annual repairs, proved no match
for this year's violent weather.
"Houses flooded and some have collapsed," Gueladio Ba told Reuters by
phone from Thies in Senegal, where local media reported 127 mm (5
inches) of rain fell on Sunday night alone.
"In some parts of town the water was more than a meter (yard) deep," he
said. "The destruction is enormous. We haven't seen rain like this for
30 years."
(Additional reporting by Abigail Haulohner, Opheera McDoom, Abdoulaye
Massalatchi, Betel Miarom, Tiemoko Diallo, Diadie Ba & Katrina Manson)