Mozambique: Police shoot dead 24-year-old motor-cycle taxi driver in Chimoio - AIM
[Photo:Lusa]
Heavy rains in Beira, in central Mozambique, have brought back the nightmare of the cyclones of earlier this year, as residents were forced once more to seek refuge in a reception centre after their homes were flooded.
“I was forced to leave my house again and flee to an accommodation centre due to rain, just like in March,” said Rabeca Mussece, 33, her son in her arms, sitting in a classroom in a secondary school in the Manga neighbourhood of Beira. “I lost the little that I was trying to reorganise.”
Like Mussece, a total of 110 people were forced to seek refuge in the school after heavy rain on Wednesday and Thursday in some districts of Sofala province, including the city of Beira. These are regions that have been trying to recover after the passage in the spring of Cyclone Idai, which killed about 604 people in central Mozambique and affected 1.5 million in all, destroying various pieces of infrastructure.
The rains began in the early hours of Wednesday, heralding the rainy season that is not expected to end until April.
“In the early hours of Wednesday alone the amount of rain that fell was what we were predicting for the next fifteen days of this month,” Jamal Alfat of the National Meteorology Institute in Sofala told Lusa. “It was a lot of rain and we will continue to monitor [the situation] until the low pressure [system] passes.”
In addition to the city of Beira, residences were flooded in Marromeu, Cheringoma, Caia, Muanza, Dondo, Búzi, Nhamatanda, Marínguè, Gorongosa districts, destroying infrastructure and leaving a total of 5,000 people vulnerable.
Over the weekend, for those who took refuge in the accommodation centers, the problems seemed to be the same as nine months ago.
“We asked for water, blankets and mosquito nets, because many of us lost almost everything from Wednesday’s rain,” said Mussece.
Not far from the school the outlying neighbourhood of Ndunda clearly reflects the impact of the rains, with several houses underwater houses and children playing in ponds that represent a clear danger to public health.
“There are people drinking water taken from the ponds,” warns Afonso Luis Neves, one of the few residents of the neighbourhood who opted to remain in place, although sometimes he feared that the rain would be as bad as with Cyclone Idai.
“We didn’t quite know what was happening in the early hours of Wednesday,” he said. “But I decided to stay, you can’t lose everything again as we did with Idai.”.
Beira Central Hospital has sent teams out through the streets of to prevent outbreaks of diseases associated with the rains.
“So far, we have no case of diarrhoea related to the event we are going through, but we are ready to respond,” said the hospital’s clinical director, Ana Tambo.
Though the rains slowed on Friday, forecasts point to more rain in Beira in the coming days.
Between November and April, Mozambique is regularly hit by cyclonic winds from the Indian Ocean and floods originating in the watersheds of southern Africa.
Leave a Reply
Be the First to Comment!
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.