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Mozambique: Helicopter Breakdowns Halt Aid to Flood Victims
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
1 February 2008
Posted to the web 1 February 2008
Maputo
Both the helicopters hired to carry food aid to flood victims in parts of central Mozambique that are inaccessible overland have broken down, reports Friday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".
The two helicopters are Ukrainian, and they each operated just three days before breaking down. The first breakdown occurred in Caia, on the south bank of the Zambezi, where the relief operation is based, about a week ago.
The second helicopter suffered an accident on Wednesday at the Sambadar resettlement area in Manica province, after the first flight of the day, in which it had airlifted 2.5 tonnes of foodstuffs.
Apparently, the breakdown was caused by crew negligence. Because was saturated with water a tarpaulin was placed on the ground on which the helicopter landed. But when the aircraft took off again, the crew forgot to place weights on the tarpaulin. As a result, the updraft sucked the tarpaulin into the rotor blades.
The crew were later evacuated to Caia in a smaller helicopter that is monitoring the river valleys.
Each of the two helicopters is supposed to transport 7.5 tonnes of relief goods to the resettlement centres every day. Paulo Zucula, director of the government's relief agency, the National Disaster Management institute (INGC), told reporters that the breakdown of the second helicopter is seriously hindering the dispatch of aid to the flood victims, since 15 tonnes of aid a day is not getting through.
Meanwhile, the Zambezi is in flood and still rising along its entire length inside Mozambique, from the Zimbabwean border to the Indian Ocean.
After a brief fall on Wednesday, the river at Tete city rose again, and, according to the latest bulletin from the National Water Board (DNA), on Thursday morning it was measured at 7.69 metres, well over 2.5 metres high than the flood alert level.
Further downstream, at Mutarara the river rose sharply, from 6.2 metres on Wednesday to 6.63 metres on Thursday, while at Caia the rise was from 7.38 to 7.45 metres.
Other rivers are also on the rise again. Thus the Pungue, measured at Mafambisse, west of Beira rose from 6.9 metres on Wednesday to 7.08 metres on Thursday. Flood alert level at Mafambisse is six metres, and floods on this stretch of the Pungue bring the risk of closing down the Beira-Zimbabwe road. So far, however, although the river did spill onto the road in five different places in mid-January, traffic has not been interrupted, and the authorities have kept the highway open.
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The Buzi river is also threatening to burst its banks again. The DNA warned that the Chicamba dam, located on the Revue river, the main tributary of the Buzi was now almost 85 per cent full. It therefore increased its discharges from 197 cubic metres a second on Wednesday to 318 on Thursday. As from Friday, the discharges are scheduled to rise to 400 cubic metres a second, which is likely to lead to further flooding in the Buzi basin.
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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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