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Mozambique: Red Alert Declared On Major River Valleys
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
3 January 2008
Posted to the web 3 January 2008
Maputo
The Mozambican government's Disaster Management Coordinating Council (CCGC) on Thursday announced a red alert on the main river valleys in the central provinces.
Severe flooding has already occurred in parts of the Zambezi, Pungue, Buzi and Save valleys, and the CCGC estimates that over 55,000 people have been affected by the floods.
"Aware that the situation may get worse before the end of the rainy season, we have decided to declare a red alert and activate in full the National Operational Emergency Centre (CENOE)", declared the Minister of State Administration, Lucas Chomera, who is deputy chairperson of the CCGC.
The situation, he said would be closely monitored by CENOE delegations at Caia (on the south bank of the Zambezi) and Vilankulo (in Inhambane province, and the nearest sizeable town to the Save valley).
Chomera pointed out that the 2007/08 rainy season began earlier than normal in the south and centre of the country. In October and November, he said, "some areas received as much rain as they would normally receive in six months".
Torrential rains also fell in Zambia and Zimbabwe, which also contributed to a sharp rise in the main rivers of central Mozambique. The result was that this week the Zambezi, the Pungue, the Buzi and the Save were all "above critical level at almost all the observation stations", said Chomera.
The Save river has flooded the small towns of Machanga and Nova Mambone, and rescue operations have been launched to take to safety people clinging to rooftops and to trees. Chomera's figures showed that on Wednesday the Save, at the Vila Franca do Save measuring station was around two metres higher than the alert level, and not far short of the level reached during the huge flood on the Save in 1976.
The town of Buzi in Sofala province has also been flooded, and the flood on the Buzi now seems certain to be on a larger scale than the catastrophic flooding of February 2000.
The Pungue river has continued to rise and threatens to cut the main road from Beira to Zimbabwe. Many low lying parts of the Sofala districts of Dondo and Nhamatanda are under water.
As for the Zambezi, the river is well above alert level at Caia and Marromeu on its lower stretches, though still considerably short of the levels reached in February last year, when there was serious flooding throughout the Zambezi Valley.
Chomera said that so far 2,598 households (about 13,000 people) have been evacuated from critical areas and moved to higher ground or to government-run accommodation centres. Most of these evacuations (1,813 households) took place in the Zambezi Valley.
"These are people who were resettled after previous disasters, but who abandoned the accommodation centres and returned to low-lying areas in order to farm", said Chomera.
The Minister pledged that search and rescue efforts will continue in the affected river valleys, while teams from the Ministries of Public Works and Agriculture calculate the damage done to infrastructures and crops. As from Friday, a preliminary assessment will be made into the food and sanitation needs of the people evacuated.
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The government's contingency plan for this year, to face possible natural disasters, envisaged a total fund of 80.2 million meticais (about 3.4 million dollars). The Finance Ministry has so far disbursed 20 million meticais.
Thursday's bulletin from the National Water Board (DNA) brings the good news that it has stopped raining in most of the country, and the levels of the Buzi and the Save are now beginning to drop.
But the situation along the Zambezi gives grounds for concern. Large amounts of water from Zimbabwe and Zambia have continued to pour into the Cahora Bassa lake, forcing the Cahora Bassa dam operating company, HCB, to increase its discharges from 4,500 to 5,100 cubic metres a second. This is likely to worsen the flooding on the lower Zambezi.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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