W African floods affect 65 000

2007-08-31 19:56

Dakar - Severe flood damage has in two months affected more than 65 000 people in West Africa, making thousands homeless and wrecking infrastructure, the Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations said on Friday.

Heavy rain and "unprecedented floods" from Senegal to Nigeria have caused the "loss of human lives and devastated crop zones, plunging some populations into total penury," the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

The West African IFRC office in Dakar gave no estimate of the fatality rate, but reports from individual nations in the past seven weeks mount into dozens, with tens of thousands of homes destroyed.

State radio in Burkina Faso on Thursday gave a death toll of at least 15 in the south of the country, while 24 people perished in one northern Nigeria state this week alone, authorities there said.

"In all the countries concerned, Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers are working to help people, distributing essential goods, alerting them to the risks of disease and helping the most vulnerable to shelter," the statement said.

The worst of the damage was in Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia and Ivory Coast, as well as in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which are three of the poorest nations in the world, the statement said.

"Many communities were caught unawares by rainfall far heavier than usual," Louis Aka Philippe of the IFRC's catastrophe management resources department said. According to the statement, the situation worsened swiftly in August when floods spread rapidly.

- SAPA