From drought to flood
Torrential rains in November 1997 brought the worst flooding in more than three decades to Somalia, wracking the country and its people who have already had more than their share of civil wars and recurring droughts.
The high magnitude of destruction and flooding from these torrential rains, the worse since 1960, have caused the death of thousands of people and have wiped out tens of thousands of livestock, farms and villages. Some of the villages are completely under water. When you fly over the region all you can see are the tips of the roofs.
Due to the absence of a central government, only a few places have been visited. Many parts of the country are inaccessible and so one of the major problems is that nobody knows the full effect of the flooding.
The few international agencies that operate in Somalia are doing well in evacuating people and distributing food and blankets. However, due to the large scale of the problem, the nomadic nature of Somalis, and the absence of transport like helicopters and air canoes, most of the affected areas have not been attended to. Access is rendered very difficult as roads are flooded, bridges are under water or have been washed away and only two airstrips are open in more than four flooded regions.
Thousands and thousands of people have been affected. Many have lost their homes and their crops and are now displaced. These torrential rains were preceded by a major drought and the combination of the two extreme weather events has had a disastrous impact on an already fragile rural population.
Every year, extreme climatic problems occur around the globe with droughts in some places and floods in others. Recently, we have come to recognize that some of these widely dispersed climatic extremes might have a common origin in the occasional warming of sea surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans. This phenomenon is known as El Niño.
The rains in Somalia, believed to have been caused by El Niño, have burst the banks of the Jubba and Shabeelle rivers (the two main rivers) in several locations and their areas are now hundreds of kilometres wide.
It is estimated that over one thousand people have died and that about one million are directly affected. People have taken shelter on small islets, others have clung to tree branches and thousands have become trapped by the floods in the vicinity of their villages. Food stocks, usually stored underground, have been destroyed.
SEPADO has been able to closely monitor the rains through the meteorological forecasting data provided by the United States-funded Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) project. At the time of writing in late November, it was considered that the rains would continue for many more days.
SEPADO appeals to all to come to the rescue of the Somali people who have been devastated by the floods.
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