A large concentration of orange water flows with force in an unusual place: the Algerian desert. Several people watch its passage while the current damages some homes scattered on the arid terrain. Some adobe houses cannot stand the humidity and their walls are starting to collapse. They are part of the images transferred from the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria), where the torrential rains suffered this Sunday and Monday caused heavy flooding in the Dakhla camp, wilaya more isolated from the Algerian hamada, which is home to thousands of people after the Spanish abandonment of Western Sahara and the subsequent occupation by Morocco. According to the Sahrawi Red Crescent, around 350 families have been forced to leave the camps for safer locations.
Several videos released by the Red Crescent show significant concentrations of water which, unlike the arid terrain, are flowing along some precarious adobe houses while damaging some of them, which are beginning to collapse. The authorities of the wilaya – districts in which the Sahrawi refugee camps are distributed – and the Sahrawi Red Crescent are currently assessing the damage on the ground. To make an initial assessment of the emergency situation, a delegation composed of United Nations agencies and NGOs from Dakhla arrived this Monday morning, as reported by the Red Crescent in a press release. The population residing in the Sahrawi refugee camps depends on humanitarian aid.
“The Sahrawi Red Crescent calls on donors and humanitarian organizations to provide urgent and emergency assistance to the Sahrawi refugee populations in Dakhla,” the statement warns. The houses that remain standing after the storms are also not safe. Because they are built of adobe, the houses can disappear when the mud dries.
In recent weeks, the rains recorded in this area of the desert have affected other wilayas in which the Sahrawi refugee camps are distributed. “It should be noted that the other camps have also suffered rains in the past week and that various infrastructure damages have been recorded: in houses and public facilities,” the organization says.
At the beginning of September, the forecast made by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and advanced by elDiario.es, was fulfilled in several desert regions of North Africa, where for several days there was rain reaching up to 50 liters per square meter in some areas.
In Morocco and Algeria, torrential rains left nearly twenty dead and nine missing, in addition to destroying homes and infrastructure related to drinking water and electricity. In the Sahrawi camps, bread could not arrive for several hours because communications were blocked.
“The electricity has been cut off, my mother and her neighbors are here. They say it will rain until 5 a.m., which worries us a little. For the moment, it doesn’t stop,” Khadya, 26, tells this media outlet from El Aaiún, another Sahrawi refugee camp in southern Algeria. In the early morning, before the rains, she and her family prepared with flashlights and charged mobile phones for an unusual scenario predicted by meteorologists a few days before: heavy rains in the Sahara desert, well above the annual average.
