Maputo, Mozambique — The waters of the Zambezi River are now flooding low-lying parts of Tete city, the largest urban centre on the river.
The Nhartanda valley, which forms part of the city, was inundated in Monday morning, and the flood is likely to cut the city in two some time on Tuesday. Radio Mozambique reported that the high part of the city is now like an island surrounded by water.
The Tete Municipal Council has been advised to evacuate people from parts of the city now regarded as unsafe. Similarly people in the neighbouring district of Moatize have been told to move away from the banks of the Revobue, a major tributary of the Zambezi, which is also in full flood.
The management of HCB, the company that operates the Cahora Bassa dam, reduced discharges from the dam on Monday from 7,500 to 7,100 cubic metres of water a second, according to Tuesday's issue of the daily paper "Noticias".
But the dam lake is still receiving 11,000 cubic metres a second pouring in from Zambia and Zimbabwe.
A spokesman for the HCB board of directors told the paper "Our holding capacity is already at the limit. We are discharging water in coordination with the National Water Board in order not to create a catastrophe in the Zambezi basin, even though the situation is critical for the dam".
On Monday Tete provincial governor Tomas Mandlate told reporters that the situation was now "alarming", and he feared this disaster could rival the 1978 Zambezi flood, the largest flood on the river in the 20th century.
But in 1978 all eight Cahora Bassa lower floodgates were opened, plus the surface sluice-gate, releasing a massive 13,500 cubic metres of water a second. There is still a long way to go before the discharges from Cahora Bassa reach that level.
The district worst affected by the floods remains Mutarara, at the confluence of the Zambezi and the Shire rivers.
A total of 55,000 people are affected by the floods in Mutarara, of whom 15,000 have sought refuge in government accommodation centres, which are now in urgent need of more tents, medicines, and chlorine to purify drinking water.
Further downstream, in Sofala province, there are about 26,300 people in five accommodation centres in the district of Caia. The precarious state of access roads is making re-supplying these centres difficult.
The major challenge to the authorities, however, is to evacuate perhaps as many as 50,000 people from the flood plains near the mouth of the river.
According to the Mozambican meteorology office, rainfall is continuing in the centre of the country, but is slackening in intensity. However, it is still raining heavily in Malawi and Zambia, and much of this rain is certain to be channelled towards the Zambezi.
