1 Million Lack Food and Shelter After Floods in Sudan’s Capital

One million of Khartoum’s 4 million people are without food or shelter after floods devastated the Sudanese capital last week, government officials and foreign diplomats estimated Monday.

The city has been without power for five days, most areas have no fresh water supply and most telephone and telex links with the outside world remained cut.

“What we have here is a major disaster,” one diplomat said.

Torrential Rains

The government declared Khartoum and three provincial towns disaster areas after they were inundated by floods triggered by 13 hours of torrential rains on Thursday and Friday.

Sudan, which only two weeks ago was thought to be suffering its second major drought in four years, has appealed for urgent international assistance.

Scores of people were killed or injured when their houses collapsed or were swept away. Others were electrocuted when power pylons and cables fell onto submerged streets.

Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the shanty towns ringing Khartoum, spent their third successive night Sunday out in the open with little food.

In the suburbs of Omdurman and Bahari, which were among the worst-hit areas, thousands huddled together on heaps of soggy furniture salvaged from their destroyed homes.

Younis Youssef Dahab, 45, father of eight children from one of Omdurman’s shanty towns, said scores of houses were swept into the river Nile on Friday.

Furniture Floating Away

“People could see their furniture and belongings floating on the river,” he told. “Government officials visited us and promised tents and food, but we are still waiting to see them.”

He said entire blocks of mud houses were swept into the river by a wall of water that he estimated to be 6 feet high.

The official Sudan news agency SUNA quoted an official source at the state electricity authority as saying the capital’s two largest power stations were out of action.

Government officials said that flooding from the Nile this year could be the worst this century.