In recent days in Kenya and other East African countries at least 200 people have died due to major floods and landslides caused by heavy and prolonged rains. In Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi, floods have overwhelmed entire population centers, flooded roads and houses, and landslides have demolished homes and caused the collapse of some dams.
Warning: The gallery below contains some strong images.
The latest episode was on Monday morning, when a large mass of water inundated entire towns in the Mai Mahiu area, in western Kenya, causing the death of at least 45 people: the flooding was attributed to the collapse of a dam , but the causes are still to be clarified and another hypothesis, put forward by humanitarian workers and local media, is that it was caused by the collapse of an obstructed railway tunnel.
The Mai Mahiu flood occurred around 3 am local time, and there are around forty people missing: Emmanuel Talam, press secretary to President William Ruto, called it the most devastating episode since the floods began, two weeks ago.
In Tanzania, floods have engulfed entire districts of Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, with streets entirely submerged in water. At least 155 people died and over 200 were injured. Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said the rains, floods and landslides had severely damaged homes, roads, bridges, schools and places of worship. Many farms were also severely damaged, with floods destroying land and killing hundreds of farm animals.
In Burundi the greatest damage was caused by the rise in the water level of Lake Tanganyika, which caused major flooding in the port of Bujumbura, considered the economic center of the country, blocking much of the activity. There was also damage in other parts of the country, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced.
In the poorest areas of all the affected countries, floods have destroyed already very precarious infrastructure, with consequences made even more extreme by inadequate drainage systems and roads in poor condition. The people most affected, and in general most exposed to the consequences of phenomena of this type, were those living in slums, crammed into informal settlements without access to adequate roads, drinking water and often electricity.
The heavy rains of recent weeks have been attributed by experts above all to a combination of two climatic phenomena. The first is the influence of “El Niño”, the set of atmospheric phenomena that occurs periodically in the Pacific Ocean and has consequences on the climate of a large part of the planet, contributing among other things to increasing the average global temperature. The other phenomenon is the effect of the “Indian Ocean Dipole”, which is also called the “Indian Niño”: it is a similar atmospheric event that regulates the temperatures of ocean water. The surface of the western Indian Ocean is currently warmer than usual, which favors the intensity of precipitation over East Africa.
Climatology has long reported that climate change caused by human activities will lead to an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts in many parts of the world. It is not possible to automatically attribute a single extreme event to climate change without specific studies, but global warming is known to increase risks and require measures to prevent and limit damage.
