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Half a million displaced after severe flooding in Sudan

A Sudanese woman sits with her child next to her house in a flooded street on the outskirts of the capital Khartoum. Photo:Getty

 

Half a million displaced after severe flooding in Sudan

 

By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | SEPTEMBER 19th 2020

 

The White Nile and Blue Nile are two extremely important rivers in Sudan, serving as its lifeblood. Recently however, they’ve become a source of the country’s terror and woe, as at least 100 have been killed, and 500,000 have been displaced following sever floods and heavy rains.

The floods have been an issue for the country for months now, with 115 people having been verified as dead since July. The flash-floods broke records, and even now, the residents of the country are living under constant threat of further flooding and displacement as heavy rains continue. Sudan is currently in its rainy season, lasting from June to October time, so residents expect the rains to continue until then.

“We tried to build fences to protect our home but the winds were too strong, so we decided to salvage what we could and fled,” Hanan Shariff, one of the thousands of flood victims, told Al Jazeera. She’s been living in a makeshift camp in Sinjah since the loss of her village to the floods, and has been struggling since.

This is the unfortunate reality of the 500,000 people who’ve lost their homes due to the natural disaster. Emergency food assistance, supplied by the United Nations, had to be scaled up. The worst hit area in the country was Khartoum, having been inundated by waters from both the Nile rivers. Aid was slow to arrive to the area, forcing many to take shelter in schools and government buildings.

Humanitarian responses were difficult to deploy, due to the many damages caused to bridges and roads. The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), along with many other humanitarian aid services, reported many similar damages in their offices and warehouses. In many cases, crops, livestock, and life assets have succumb to flood damages themselves, making food security difficult to attain, and recovery nearly impossible.

The flooding situation could have been much worse than it was, some say, due to a recently built dam in Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile river originates. Rains have been particularly heavy in the Ethiopian highlands. If not for the dam, many more may have been drowned or displaced.

A three-month state of emergency was declared in early September by the Sudanese government, specifically its Humanitarian Aid Commission.

“Local communities provided some food, and also we complement each other as humanitarian actors here in the field,” said Mutwali Adam of the UN children's fund (UNICEF). He added, however, that many of the people in the camps near Sinjah are still in major need of “basic humanitarian needs like food, shelters and medicine.”

The floods come at a terrible time for Sudan, as alongside the state of emergency declared for the natural disaster, so too had there been an economic state of emergency declared after the country’s currency saw a severe decline in value. As such, food has become even more difficult to acquire, as prices continue to soar.

Sudan was once known as the Kingdom of Kush, and still holds some of the world’s most ancient ruins of past civilisations. The floods experienced by the country this year have threatened some of those ruins, particularly the ruins of Meroe, known to some as the seat of the pyramid-building empire around 2,000 years prior.

There is a long and extensive history of flooding in Sudan, with its worst being in 1988, when an estimated 1.5 million people were displaced from their homes. At the time of that flood, an outbreak of cholera, typhoid and malaria had also occurred within the country, claiming some 1,200 lives. Floods such as these, similar to the ones in present day, most usually occur after weeks of unusually heavy rainfall, causing the Nile river waters to flood their banks.

They can be especially destructive during a time of pandemic, such as now. With the COVID-19 coronavirus panic in full rise, many are fearful that such a disaster may only give the virus greater spread, claiming more lives as a result and prolonging the breakout.

Aid continues to be supplied to the displaced Sudanese people in their time of need, but little more can be done at this time.

 

By Patryk Krych | © The World Daily 2020

 

 

Categories:
World
Tags:
AfricaNorth AfricaSudanNatural DisastersHumanitarian Crisis