Mozambique floods displace 68,000, more at risk

Caia (Mozambique)Feb 12: Floods in Mozambique have left 68,000 people homeless and 280,000 more may be forced to evacuate this week as torrential rains lash the impoverished country, a top official said today.

The head of Mozambique's national relief agency INGC told Reuters around 27,000 people had been moved to accommodation centres from areas along the Zambezi river and around 41,000 more had no shelter after their homes were submerged.

Paulo Zucula said 280,000 people mostly poor rural folk who live in tiny mud huts and survive by growing vegetables and rearing goats and chickens would probably be forced from their homes this week as more rains swept the southern African country.

Experts fear the crisis could surpass the devastating floods of 2000 and 2001, which killed 700 people, displaced half a million and wrecked infrastructure.

''We expect more water than we had in 2001. The situation is deteriorating and it will get worse but this time we are better prepared than in 2001,'' Zucula said in an interview in Caia, one of the worst hit areas, some 1,400 kilometres (875 miles) north of the capital Maputo.

The floods, sparked when rains from neighbouring Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi poured into the overflowing Cahora Bassa Dam, have killed 29 people and damaged thousands of homes and schools, mainly in the central Zambezia and Sofala provinces.

Many face homelessness for the second time after the floods six years ago wrecked their homes. Even in accommodation centres, food, water and medicine are scarce and shelter limited.

In Chapunga, in Sofala, around 600 people flocked to an accommodation centre but tents are scarce and many are sleeping in the open.

''I lost everything, I brought my wife and my two sick children and we are sleeping in the open, there are no tents and there is no food here,'' said 45 year-old Joaquim Dausse.

''This is the second time I'm facing this flooding I can't believe it,'' said Dausse, hunched beside a sick child whose bloated tummy hinted at malnutrition.

Reuters