Eleven
people have died in flooding in Niger and 30,000 left homeless after vast
swathes of the country — including arid desert locations — were deluged with
heavy rain, the UN said Friday. The worst affected regions are both desert
areas: Tahoua in the west, where seven people died and 5,321 people were left
homeless, and Agadez in the north where three people were killed and 18,448
lost their homes, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In the two areas, the freak weather claimed the
lives of 19,536 cows, goats, sheep and camels while also devastating hundreds
of acres of land, according to local authorities. Images broadcast by public
television showed roads cut off by streams and land littered with rotting
animal corpses.
In the Agadez region annual rainfall seldom exceeds 130
millimetres and floods like those seen in recent days are rare. But since June,
as much as 115 millimetres has regularly been falling in a matter of hours,
according to weather reports. Nigerien authorities and the UN have been
distributing food aid to help families displaced by the flooding. Niger is in
the midst of its annual rainy season, having struggled to overcome a severe
food crisis caused by drought. The rains are unlikely to ease the pressure on
the country’s food supply given the damage flooding — caused by climate change
— has wrought on crops. In early June the UN warned that flooding could affect
100,000 people in the poor desert country by the end of the year. In 2015 as
many as 103,000 people were left homeless by floods that claimed the lives of
tens of victims.
Source:Vanguard
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