Floods in Southern Africa have displaced thousands of people, drowned livestock and put large numbers of children at risk from serious disease, officials said on Tuesday.
About 1,5-million Zambians may have to flee their homes because of floods that have killed six people in neighbouring Mozambique and cut off vast areas of Zimbabwe.
Zambian state television broadcast images of refugees carrying beds, chickens and goats over their heads as they moved through the surging floodwaters. Half of the country has been put on alert.
”I have lost everything that I owned and my children cannot go to school because the roads have been destroyed, and the bridge we normally cross to get to other places has been damaged too,” one villager said.
Tens of thousands are at risk after torrential rains inundated the region, said the United Nations, which was consulting governments to assess the flood damage.
Authorities in Zambia and Zimbabwe said there had been casualties, but could not be specific.
Raging waters in Zimbabwe, which is suffering from an economic crisis marked by food and fuel shortages, have cut road links with large parts of the country.
Heavy downpours are common in Southern Africa during the annual rainy season, which runs generally from November to April, but the relentless rain is unusual.
Fields are waterlogged and crops have been damaged, raising fears of a return to the food shortages that plagued the region as little as three years ago. Those fears are particularly pointed in Zimbabwe, which has struggled to feed itself.
Officials said 500 houses collapsed in Monze, 200km south of the Zambian capital, Lusaka, while others were trapped on an island due to the rising waters.
In Mozambique, floods threatened to expose children to diseases such as diarrhoea, Save the Children said in a statement. Diarrhoea is one of the biggest killers of children in Africa.
”Several rivers in Mozambique have reached dangerously high levels, forcing thousands of children from their homes in order to seek safety on higher ground,” the humanitarian group said.
”As the waters rise and the threat of flooding intensifies, it is predicted that up to 250 000 people, about half of them children, could be affected.”
Floods killed 45 people and left 285 000 homeless last year after torrential rain and hurricanes swept through Mozambique.
It was the worst flooding since 2000/01, when 700 people died and another half a million were driven from their homes. — Reuters