Maputo — The central Mozambican town of Marromeu on the south bank of the Zambezi river is on a state of maximum alert, as the river continues to rise.
The Sofala provincial delegate of the National Disaster Management Institute, Antonio Chicumbe, cited in Thursday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", said that all possible resources are being shifted to Marromeu to avoid a catastrophe.
In particular, efforts are under way to shore up the protective dike - but the dike has already been breached in several places.
People living on islands in the river near Marromeu have already been evacuated, and the authorities are now moving people from the most flood-prone areas in and around the town to the safe locality of Chupanga.
Further south, the port city of Beira remains cut off by road from most of the rest of the country because of the flood on the Pungue river. The Mutua-Tica stretch of the Beira-Zimbabwe road remains under water, thus making road traffic west to Zimbabwe and south to Maputo impossible.
However, the railway, which runs parallel to the road, is not submerged, and anyone who desperately needs to make the trip south or west can pay the railway company, CFM, to take his vehicle by train from Dondo to Tica, thus bypassing the flooded road.
According to a report in the independent newsheet "Metical", CFM is charging 1,050,000 meticais (about 58 US dollars) to take light vehicles across, and between 1.5 and two million meticais for heavy ones. A passenger pays just 6,000 meticais for the trip.
The train takes three hours to make the 41 kilometre journey, and travels once a day in each direction (under normal circumstances, the train only goes four times a week).
But there is not enough space on the train: a woman passenger cited by "Metical" said there were cases of people waiting for three days for a place. The train has eight passenger carriages, all packed - so much so that some people have risked travelling in the goods wagons, alongside cargo and vehicles.
It is possible to drive northwards from Beira as far as Caia, on the Zambezi. But there the journey stops, since the ferry to Chimuara on the other bank is no longer operating. Ferry crossings have been suspended due to the critical level of the river. On Wednesday, the Zambezi was 7.89 metres high at Caia - critical level is six metres.
