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Mozambique: No Emergency Appeal for Flood Relief
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
15 January 2008
Posted to the web 15 January 2008
Maputo
The Mozambican government has no intention of issuing an international appeal for assistance to cope with the current flooding in the centre of the country, unless the situation deteriorates dramatically.
Speaking at a Maputo press conference on Tuesday, Paulo Zucula, the director of the government's relief agency, the National Disasters Management Institute (INGC), declared "We are working very hard to prevent disaster. Our intention is to avoid making an international appeal. If we have to launch an appeal, it will be because we have failed to avoid a humanitarian disaster".
He could not rule the possibility of an appeal out altogether, but insisted it was "far too early to talk of making a formal appeal. If we do that, it will be because we have exhausted all our local possibilities. And it is too early to say that".
"Unfortunately, there are some organizations that live off emergencies", added Zucula, "but internationally it is generally accepted that it is better to prevent than to cure. And that is our strategy".
Zucula said that, as of Monday, 11,641 families (around 60,000 people) had been evacuated from the flooded river basins. 9,828 of these families had been evacuated from vulnerable areas in the Zambezi valley, and much smaller numbers from the Pungue, Buzi and Save basins.
The INGC knew of seven deaths in the floods - four people who had drowned in the flood on the Pungue, and three others reportedly eaten by crocodiles. He dismissed claims in dome of the foreign media that there had been 50 or more deaths. "Fortunately, this is not true", said Zucula.
He also rejected the alarmist claim by a local Reuters correspondent, and picked up by the BBC, that the Zambezi had "swamped" Tete city. The Zambezi had burst its banks, and its waters invaded low-lying areas of Tete, but there was no question of it swamping the entire city.
Zucula said the National Civil Protection Unit (UNAPROC) was still evacuating people from "critical areas" along the Zambezi. These are Inhangoma, at the confluence of the Zambezi and shire rivers, which is now cut off from the rest of the country, and Mopeia and Morrumbala districts in Zambezia province. In other districts (Tambara, Chemba, Caia and Marromeu, all on the south bank of the river) evacuation was complete and there was nobody left in dangerous areas.
In its rescue operations, the INGC is using 16 motor boats (10 of them on the Zambezi), assisted by the canoes of local farmers and fishermen. Two helicopters are monitoring the river valleys.
Unlike the situation in the huge floods of southern Mozambique in 2000, the helicopters are not winching people to safety out of tree tops. Instead they are telling the boats where to find isolated groups of people. "Helicopters have much better visibility", said Zucula. "They can discover where people are, and sometimes even how many of them there are".
The INGC is not putting the displaced people into temporary "accommodation centres". Instead it is moving them directly to resettlement areas. There are 37 of these, most of which were set up to house the victims of the 2007 Zambezi flood.
In these areas, the INGC operates food-for-work schemes - families are expected to build their own houses, and in return they are given food. This avoids the "disorganized queues" for free handouts, said Zucula.
The INGC's preparations began in October when the contingency plan for 2008 was drafted. This envisaged three possible scenarios, and Zucula pointed out that the current floods fall a long way short of the worst case scenario, in which 1.8 million people would have been affected by floods and cyclones. So far this season, there has only been one cyclone in the Mozambique Channel, which did not hit the Mozambican coast.
Zucula warned that the situation could deteriorate. Indeed, if the current rises in the levels of the Limpopo and Licungo rivers were the prelude to flooding in these basins "then we could see worse floods than in 2000. However, with the plans that are being put into effect, we believe that the impact in terms of human lives will be much less". (About 700 people died in the 2000 floods).
One positive sign is that on Monday the Cahora Bassa dam reduced its discharges from 6,200 to 5,500 cubic metres a second, thus lessening the pressure on the lower Zambezi. Nonetheless, the flood on the Zambezi has already exceeded last year's flood, and the river is only half a metre short of reaching the levels attained by the Zambezi in the huge flood of 2001.
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As for material damage, Zucula said that the calculations have not yet been made - but at least 22,000 houses are under water, and 17,000 hectares of crops are known to have been lost.
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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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