In Chad, floods have left 341 dead and 1.5 million affected since July

Torrential rains and floods that hit the African continent this summer have left 341 dead and 1.5 million affected since July in Chad, according to a report published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad.

“The country’s twenty-three provinces are currently affected by the flood crisis, which has become increasingly recurrent in recent years.”According to this report which shows “164,000 houses destroyed, 259,000 hectares of fields destroyed and 66,700 heads of livestock devastated”The Chadian government has not yet published a comprehensive assessment of the bad weather that has been hitting this poor Sahel country for several weeks.

Last week, fourteen students and their teacher were killed when a school collapsed after torrential rains in Ouaddaï province in semi-arid eastern Chad. In mid-August, at least fifty-four people died in floods that hit Tibesti province in the far desert of northern Chad.

Normally, “Rainfall barely reaches 200 mm per year” in this mountainous region, but this climatic phenomenon occurs “every five or ten years”according to Idriss Abdallah Hassan, director of the meteorological observation and forecasting network of the National Meteorological Agency.

In 2022, heavy rains, the heaviest since the 1960s, affected around 1.4 million people in 19 of the country’s 23 provinces and triggered a major humanitarian crisis, worsening food insecurity among its inhabitants. The bad weather then destroyed more than 350,000 hectares of crops, caused the loss of 20,000 heads of livestock and caused considerable damage to thousands of homes, schools, health centres and public infrastructure, according to a report published at the time by Ocha.

“Climate crisis”

Last week, the UN warned of the impact “Torrential rains and severe flooding” in the region, asking “immediate action and sufficient funding” to face the “climate crisis”.

The summer of 2024 was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, where temperature records have remained unchanged for more than a year, with its procession of heat waves, droughts and deadly floods fueled by relentless global warming.

In Niger, torrential rains have caused at least 273 deaths and 700,000 victims since June, according to figures published in early September by the authorities. “hundreds of thousands of children” In Niger, Nigeria and Mali, people were forced to leave their homes before the start of the school year due to torrential rains and flooding in recent weeks, according to the NGO Save the Children. Nearly 950,000 people were displaced in these three countries – 649,184 in Niger, 225,000 in Nigeria and 73,778 in Mali – according to the same source.

In South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, more than 700,000 people have been affected by severe flooding, according to a report released by OCHA on 5 September. Torrential rains and violent gales have also affected 562,000 people in Yemen in recent weeks, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

In the north of the continent, torrential rains accompanied by violent floods have left at least eleven dead and nine missing since Friday in normally semi-arid areas of southern Morocco. The volume of rainfall recorded in two days is equivalent to what these regions normally experience in an entire year, according to Moroccan authorities. This climatic phenomenon “exceptional” It also affected neighbouring Algeria.