Night-time flash floods kill 28, leave 500 families homeless

Flash floods in northeastern Nigeria engulfed three villages as the residents slept, killing at least 28 people and making 500 families homeless, government officials said. The low-lying village of Loko in Adamawa state, which lies on a tributary of the Benue river, was the worst hit. It was inundated on Sunday night following more than a week of heavy rain, officials said. “They just woke up in the night to find that the water was already more than ankle-high in their compounds,” John Ngamsa, a member of the government delegation that visited the area, told IRIN by telephone from the state capital Yola. The nearby villages of Dumne and Dikwa were also badly affected, Ngamsa said. "Because it is quite far way from Yola, they couldn’t get any word out until Tuesday," he added. Lydia Justine, a government health official in Yola, 140 km to the south of the flood zone, said the remote location of the villages had made the situation worse. “Before help could reach the communities on Wednesday, Loko had been swept away completely,” she told IRIN. “The entire village was partially submerged. Some of the villagers escaped to the nearby mountains." “The crops were gone. Domestic animals were gone too, and we learnt that about 28 people were swept away by the flood,” she said. The death-toll could rise again since a search party is still trying to find corpses in the village's fast-flowing, muddy stream, Justine added. Adamawa state government has set up a camp for 500 displaced families in a secondary school in the nearby town of Song, but there are concerns about the living conditions. “They are crammed in small spaces in the classrooms and in that type of situation you cannot rule out the likelihood of outbreak of disease because the sanitary conditions there are simply pathetic, to say the least," Justine said. "Even if disease does not get them, hunger will.” August and September are traditionally the wettest months in northern Nigeria. And Adamawa State is bracing for even worse emergencies in September when neighbouring Cameroon opens the floodgates of the Lagdo dam further upstream on the Benue river.