Somalia: Devastating floods kill at least 31 people, displace hundreds of thousands more

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Deadly “once in a century” floods in Somalia have killed at least 31 people and displaced around 500,000 more, the Associated Press reported on Sunday.

Caused by heavy rains which have battered Somalia for nearly two weeks, the flooding had also killed 15 people in neighboring Kenya and 20 people in Ethiopia’s Somali region by Monday, AP said.

Somalia’s Information Minister Daud Aweis said in a statement on Sunday that another 1.2 million people could be affected by the floods, and that the death toll may rise, AP reports. The Gedo region in the south and Hiran region in the center have been the worst affected areas with homes and farmland flooded and the Shabelle River bursting its banks and washing away homes in the town of Beledweyne.

The UN humanitarian agency, OCHA, stated last week that Somalia was vulnerable to massive flooding because of the combined effects of the El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole climate phenomena, AP reports. El Niño is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific; it is accompanied by high air pressure in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the eastern Pacific. Indian Ocean Dipole refers to the difference in sea-surface temperatures in opposite parts of the Indian Ocean.

“The impact of the flooding is much worse because the soil is so damaged from an unprecedented recent drought – years of conflict and al Shabaab militia’s presence also makes building flood defenses and resilience more complex and costly,” Nazanine Moshiri, a climate analyst at the International Crisis Group, said in a statement.

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