‘Water is coming.’ Floods devastate west and central Africa
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Aishatu Bunu, an elementary schoolteacher in Maiduguri, a city in Nigeria’s northeast, woke up at 5 a.m. to the sound of her neighbors shouting.
When she opened her front door, she was greeted by the sight of rising waters outside.
She and her three young children grabbed some clothes and her educational certificates and fled their home into waters that quickly became chest high, eventually finding temporary shelter at a gas station.
Bunu was speaking Friday from the bed of a truck that she managed to board with her children after several days of sheltering at various sites across the flood-stricken city. The floodwaters inundated Maiduguri early last week after heavy rainfall caused a nearby dam to overflow.
Flooding caused by the rain has devastated cities and towns across west and central Africa in recent days, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Up to 4 million people have been affected by the floods and nearly 1 million forced to flee their homes, according to humanitarian agencies.
The exact number of deaths has been difficult to tally given the scale of the disaster, and the officially reported figures are not up-to-date. In Nigeria, authorities said that at least 200 people had died, but that was before the floods hit Maiduguri, which has added at least 30 people to that toll. In Niger, more than 265 have been reported dead. In Chad, 487 people had lost their lives as of last week. In Mali, which is facing its worst floods since the 1960s, 55 died.
Scenes of devastation could be seen across Maiduguri on Friday. Dead people and animals floated past. People were trapped in schools and on rooftops.
Over the weekend, many people were rescued across the city after being trapped by the floodwaters for days. The ground floor of the main hospital was submerged, destroying vital equipment, samples and the polio laboratory.
In Nigeria and in most of the region, floods are hitting communities already racked by conflict, displacement and poverty. Even worse flooding is forecast for later in the year.
Although Africa produces only a fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, Africans bear an exceptionally heavy burden from climate change, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
And adapting to it will cost sub-Saharan Africa $30 billion to $50 billion annually over the next decade, it said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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