ENVIRONMENT: Floods Threaten Thousands in Ethiopia and Sudan

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Aug 21 1996 (IPS) - Thousands of people living along river banks are threatened by heavy flooding in Ethiopia and Sudan.

In Ethiopia, where torrential rains have caused the Awash River in the central district of Oromo to overflow its banks, about 150,000 people are under threat. Ethiopia’s government said Wednesday it had established four temporary shelters to care for those driven from their homes by the rising river.

A senior official in the office of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said the eastern districts of Wenji, Matahara, and Amibara had been most affected by the rains, which have changed the river’s course.

Floodwaters have already destroyed crops, roads and wells. According to media reports, rescue workers had reached some 1,000 people cut off by the flooding, but more than 1,000 hectares of crops had been wrecked.

Mesmin Teshome, head of the Koka Hydropower utility, said the flood waters were just 60 centimetres from the top of the 110- metre Koka dam, located 120 km southeast of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

The government has urged people downstream of the dam to leave the area before the floodgates are opened. State-run Radio Ethiopia said Wednesday that the hydro-power facility had been releasing about the same amount of water as had flowed into its reservoir over the past three days.

In neighbouring Sudan, some 326 houses in 26 villages along the Blue Nile, a tributary of the Nile which originates in the Ethiopian highlands, have been affected by floods.

Sudan’s Social Planning minister, Mohamed Osman Khalifa, appealed last week to the international community for humanitarian aid for one of the villages, Getaina, located 80 km south of the capital, Khartoum.

He said a quarter of Getaina’s population had been affected by the unusually heavy rains which, according to Sudanese rebel sources, could also compound the difficulties faced by thousands of people in the southern district of Bor, who have already been suffering from an earlier bout of rain.

“About three quarters of the land surface in Bor … was flooded this year when torrential rains poured for 36 hours destroying large hectares of crops and rendering people homeless,” said Deng D’Agwang, an information officer of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

As a result, he said, people in seven districts in Bor, which is controlled by the SPLA, now face starvation. “Hunger and diseases are looming over the destitute population as there is no hope for any crop harvest this year,” Deng said.

Like all areas bordering Ethiopia, Bor is prone to floods. In the 1960s, more than 20,000 people died when heavy rain in the Ethiopian highlands transformed rivers there into raging torrents.

Much of the rain from the Ethiopian highlands feeds rivers that flow into the Blue Nile which, in turn, joins the White Nile in Khartoum before flowing north to Egypt and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Heavy rainfall in Ethiopia is good news for Egypt as it increases the rich alluvial soil that the Nile drags along and deposits along its banks in the North African country. But it usually spells disaster for riverain communities in parts of Ethiopia and Sudan.

Ethiopia’s National Weather Centre said this month’s rainfall was the heaviest in 20 years in some areas and that more was expected over the next month.