Five people have drowned and hundreds been displaced in northern Ethiopia since midweek after swollen rivers burst their banks, officials said on Friday.
The flooding, which started on Wednesday, comes less than a week after flash floods killed 254 in an eastern township of the country.
Three people drowned in the district of Gondor and two others were washed away in Kemissie in northern Ethiopia on Wednesday as a heavy downpour continued to pound several parts of the country, the officials said.
”A 10-year-old child, a baby girl and her mother were washed away by flash floods in northern Gondor, while two others were killed in Kemissie … in Amhara Regional state”, about 340km north of the capital, Atrsaw Melles, a regional information official, said.
In the neighbouring Tigray state, about 950km north of the capital, the river Tekze broke its banks and swept through Humera township and displaced about 400 people, while thousands of others were preparing to escape to higher grounds, they said.
”As rain is increasing daily, 4 000 residents in the area are preparing to move away to higher grounds before it gets worse,” Inspector Hadush Mekonen, a regional police official said.
The new floods came four days after at least 254 people were killed and around 10 000 others were displaced in Dire Dawa, about 500kmfrom the capital, when a sudden heavy downpour triggered flash floods that swept through the township and adjacent areas.
As search efforts for hundreds of missing and the delivery of humanitarian supplies to displaced continued, police said there were indications of human remains about 3km outside the ravaged city.
”We have received new information from the public that [there] are indications of the existence of human remains and we have dispatched a team to recover them,” the region’s police official Inspector Beniam Fikru told Agence France-Presse.
He estimated the cost of the damage wrought by the floods at about $3,4-million in the impoverished country of about 70-million people, a majority of whom depend on subsistence agriculture for their survival.
In the past few years, flooding has affected large areas of eastern and southern Ethiopia, displacing tens of thousands of people and causing damage running into millions of dollars, particularly to agriculture.
Last year, at least 200 people were killed and more than 260 000 displaced when heavy rains pounded the region, flooding rivers that quickly attracted large numbers of crocodiles, forcing survivors to cling to trees to escape being eaten. — AFP
