Heavy rains bring more floods

Heavy rains and strong winds have lashed southern Mozambique this week resulting in nine deaths and raising fears of a repeat of the catastrophic floods that devastated the country earlier this year.

News reports said five people were killed in Zambezia province and four in Nampula province. They said trees were uprooted and over 100 homes destroyed by the storms which have been raging since Sunday. Radio Mozambique quoted a government official in Zambezia province as saying that most of the roads are impassable because of uprooted trees.

Inyene Udoyen a spokesman for WFP in Maputo told IRIN that some areas in the southern Gaza province could not be reached because of damage caused to the roads. “The EN1 (the main road linking most parts of Mozambique) is still okay and in the parts that were properly repaired, the damage has mainly been to secondary and tertiary roads. But we are monitoring the situation,” he said in an e-mail message.

Flooding earlier this year killed more than 700 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Last week the weather bureau in Maputo said it expected above normal rainfall for provinces in the south, including Gaza and Inhambane which were among the worst hit in the February cyclones and where areas remain sodden.

Meanwhile, in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province over 3,000 people have been evacuated from their homes as heavy rains continue to fall over large parts of the province.
Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, have been housed in churches and community halls. The flooding has disrupted end of year examinations in many parts of the province. South African National Defence Force (SANDF) spokesman Louis Kirsteyn said the air force had been placed on full alert at the weekend to rescue trapped people but bad weather had kept them grounded.

The Southern African Weather Bureau in Pretoria said on Wednesday that more rains were expected in KwaZulu-Natal and some parts of southern Mozambique.