Heavy flooding is affecting some 350,000 people across West Africa, killing at least 25 in Ghana and seven in Burkina Faso, UN officials said on Friday.
The most badly affected appears to be Burkina Faso, where 110,000 have been forced to flee their homes, mainly in the capital, Ouagadougou.
On Friday, a seven-member assessment team from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was expected to arrive in Ouagadougou. The country’s main hospital is three-quarters flooded, requiring early discharges and massive evacuations of patients, some with infectious diseases.
Benin, too, has been flooded since July, and a UN team was there assessing its needs. Also hard hit are the Western African nations of Guinea, Niger and Senegal.
Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for OCHA in Geneva, Switzerland, said the amount of rain that fell on Thursday in Ouagadougou equaled a quarter of all Burkina Faso’s typical annual rainfall.
“It was a deluge, but you also have Ghana, where 25 people died from the bad weather and from the floods,” she told UN Radio. “The death toll is likely to increase in the coming days.”
In Burkina Faso, Minister of Social Welfare Pascaline Tamini said on state radio on Wednesday that she expected the number of people affected to grow significantly in the coming hours. Burkinan President Blaise Compaore appealed to the international community for help.
Flood damages in the nation had risen to US$152 million as of Friday, Burkinan Prime Minister Tertius Zongo said.
That included a dam destroyed and 12 bridges damaged in Ouagadougou and a dam destroyed in the northern Sahel region.
The rain in Ouagadougou last week was the worst in recent memory, but heavy rain two years ago caused flooding throughout the country, killing 84 people and displacing 146,000.
Local authorities have been forced to open the main gate of a hydroelectric dam in the Volta River basin, near the Ghana border, threatening people in both countries with additional flooding, the UN said.
When the state-run electricity company opened the dam’s gate on Friday morning, the water was less than 8cm from reaching the dam’s capacity, said Venance Bouda, the firm’s director of hydroelectric power.
“Even when we operate normally and release water, some people drown while crossing [the river] downstream,” Bouda said. “Cultivated land on the reservoir’s shores and further upstream will be flooded. We warn riverside residents to stay away from the shores.”
It is only the sixth time since the dam was built in 1994 that it has had to be opened — an instance two years ago caused flooding in parts of northern Ghana.
Ghanaian officials told the UN they had less than a day’s notice before the gate was opened, but that no one could have expected the rainfall to fill the reservoir so quickly.
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