As El Nino downpours pound East Africa, flash flooding in southwest Somalia has killed over twenty-two and uprooted hundreds of thousands from their homes, according to an official.
Severe rainstorms that began at the beginning of the month have battered Somalia, as well as its neighbors Kenya and Ethiopia, causing landslides and flooding fields and villages.
The worst drought the region has seen in forty years hit Somalia, as well as portions of Ethiopia and Kenya, before the deluge.
“We warned earlier about these rains and predicted this situation was coming,” Mohamed Moalim Abdullahi, chairman of Somalia Disaster Management Agency, said late Tuesday.
According to Abdullahi, at least 29 people have perished and around 850,000 more have been impacted, including over 300,000 who have had their homes taken from them.
The southwest of the 17 million-person nation, which is sick of conflict, was hardest hit.
Roads had been cut, according to the UN humanitarian organization OCHA, which stated on Wednesday that rescue operations were behind schedule.
“Inaccessible roads and stuck vehicles are just some of the challenges aid workers in Somalia are grappling with,” it said on X, formerly Twitter.
OCHA stated that 2,400 people are in the village of Luuq, on the route connecting Baidoa with the border between Somalia and Ethiopia, and relief organizations are “racing against time” to rescue them.
In addition to being among the nations in the Horn of Africa most susceptible to climate change, Somalia is especially ill-prepared to handle the situation given its ongoing fight against a violent Islamist insurgency.
The El Nino, which raises global temperatures, is predicted to continue until at least April 2024, according to a UN report released on Wednesday.
The World Meteorological Organization highlighted that the phenomenon was occurring in the context of rapid climate change.
Already, at least 15 people have been killed in Kenya due to flash flooding, while more than 20 people have died and over 12,000 been forced from their homes in Ethiopia’s Somali region.
Devastating floods brought on by El Nino between October 1997 and January 1998 claimed over 6,000 lives in five nations around the Horn of Africa.
As the Juba River overflowed its banks in Somalia, at least 1,800 people perished.
Over 140 individuals lost their lives in Somalia between October and November 2006 as a result of floods brought on by unusually heavy rains. Many of them drowned, while others perished from malaria or were bitten by crocodiles.
