KHARTOUM: Heavy rains have caused buildings to collapse, killing 17 in northern Sudan as the country reels from nearly 16 months of fighting between rival security forces, a medic told AFP on Tuesday.
“The death toll has risen to 17,” said a hospital worker in Abu Hamad, a small town in Sudan’s River Nile state, about 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) north of Khartoum.
“The electricity is out in the city and people are spending the night outside in the open, fearing more rains,” they said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
About 11,500 houses have already collapsed, state infrastructure minister Samir Saad told reporters on Tuesday, and at least 170 people have been injured.
Every year in August, the Nile’s peak flow is accompanied by torrential rains that destroy homes, destroy infrastructure and claim lives, both directly and indirectly through water-borne diseases.
“The heavy rains caused most of the houses to collapse and all the shops in the market collapsed,” a witness from Abu Hamad told AFP by telephone.
Last week, a flash flood killed five people in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
Torrential rains and floods across the country have killed more than 30 people since July 7, Sudan’s Federal Emergency Operations Center said on Tuesday.
According to the UN, rain and flooding have displaced more than 21,000 people since June – mostly in areas already reeling from heavy fighting.
Aid groups have repeatedly warned that humanitarian access, already hampered by war, is now almost impossible in remote areas as roads are flooded.
Sudan is facing what the United Nations recently called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, as fighting between the military and the Rapid Support Force shows no sign of abating.
More than 10 million people have been forced from their homes as major battlegrounds teeter on the brink of total famine.
The war has already plunged nearly half a million residents of the Zamzam camp outside the besieged Darfur town of El-Fasher into famine, a UN-backed assessment said last week.
