21 January 2008
Maputo — The Buzi river in the central Mozambican province of Sofala is once again in flood.
For most of last week, the river was below flood alert level, but torrential rains in Buzi district, with over 150 millimetres falling in two days, reversed the situation. According to the latest bulletin from the National Water Board (DNA), at Goonda, where the alert level is five metres, the river rose to 5.15 metres on Saturday and to 6.41 metres on Sunday.
A flood surged down the Lucite, one of the rivers that forms the Buzi, is likely to make matters worse. The Lucite rose by over five metres in 24 hours - from 3.6 metres on Friday to nine metres on Saturday.
Repeated inundations of Buzi town have caused serious erosion, and transport in and out of the district has become a nightmare.
The flood on the Zambezi, however, is beginning to subside. With the easing of the rains in Zambia and Zimbabwe, less water is pouring into the Cahora Bassa Lake. The Cahora Bassa dam was able over the weekend to keep its discharges to 4,600 cubic metres a second (compared to 6,600 cubic metres a second a week earlier).
At Tete city by Sunday the river had fallen to 4.03 metres, almost a metre below the alert level of five metres. Further downstream the river is still in flood but dropping. At Mutarara, the district worst hit by this flood, the river fell from 6.32 metres on Friday to 6.2 metres on Sunday, while at Caia, the decline was from 7.79 to 7.65 metres.
The Pungue river too fell over the weekend. Measured at the Mafambisse sugar plantation, I fell from 7.64 metres on Friday to 7.46 metres on Sunday. Although this is still well above the alert level of six metres, the threat posed by the river to the Beira-Zimbabwe road has now declined, and it seems unlikely that the Sofala provincial authorities will be obliged to ban traffic from using the road.
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