Government to move people living in wadis to higher ground

Days after torrential rains killed dozens of people in Djibouti, the government is to revive an earlier plan to permanently relocate people living in the country's main wadis - usually dry watercourses that fill up during the rainy season - to higher ground where they are safer from flooding. The USAID-funded Famine Early Warning System (FEWS-Net) said over 100 mm of rainfall inundated much of the tiny Horn of Africa country between Monday and Tuesday. The two-day rainfall accumulation, FEWS-Net added, approached Djibouti's normal annual total. According to the government plan, some 1,500 people living in the wadi of the River Ambouli near the capital, Djibouti City, would be the first to be moved to another spot 12 km away, Interior Minister Abdoulkader Doualeh said on Thursday. Thereafter, the situation in other wadis would be reviewed. The first target group includes a large number of Somali and Oromo refugees from neighbouring countries, who were forced by a shortage of land in the higher areas of the city to settle in the wadis. It also included some Djiboutians, he added, who were involved in simple artisan work in the wadis. Doualeh, who met humanitarian agencies and foreign envoys, announced that the Djibouti government was seeking US $20 million to reactivate the plan, which was first drawn up in 1994. That year a flood killed nearly 100 people in the capital. Meanwhile, the death toll from this week's torrential rains rose to 52 on Thursday when three babies were found drowned after the River Ambouli burst its banks on Tuesday. The flooding also cut off power and damaged the main railway line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, the capital of neighbouring Ethiopia. By Friday, the rains had subsided. Officials told IRIN that the government was continuing to help the families of those drowned to bury the bodies, most of which had been recovered. The director of the main hospital, Aden Deleita, told IRIN that medical personnel were taking precautions to ensure that in the aftermath of the flooding in the capital, any disease outbreak could be contained. "A lot of drowned cattle and other debris are submerged and, and as the water subsides, the corpses will begin to rot. We fear a possible outbreak of cholera or malaria," he said.