Rising Waters, and Emotions, in Africa

Heavy rain has turned to drizzle most everywhere in this flooded African country, but with rivers still rising and rescuers faced with the haunting task of choosing whom to save, the heartache is far from over.

Helicopter crews from neighboring South Africa and Malawi, working for the third day Tuesday, rescued thousands of stranded people from tree limbs and rooftops along the bursting Limpopo and Save rivers. The waterways are still being fed by record rainfall over the past three weeks rushing downstream from Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa.

But for each desperate person snatched from near-certain death, untold others had to be left behind because there were too few rescuers. Often when a helicopter does return, relief workers said, those who had been left to fend for themselves are nowhere to be found.

“You get back there, and the people aren’t there,” said Michele Quintaglie, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, which estimates that 300,000 people have been affected by the floods and that tens of thousands are still waiting to be rescued. “Most of these people don’t know how to swim. They can’t even move from one rooftop to a nearby one that is taller.”

And with children the No. 1 rescue priority, aid workers said families across the country are being torn apart by the relief operation. Witnesses report tearful scenes as parents offer their children to dangling soldiers who whisk them into the sky.

“We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of children in camps who don’t know where their parents are,” said Ian MacLeod, emergency coordinator for UNICEF. Varying estimates put the death toll from the flooding at between 150 and 200, but authorities fear that the number could increase into the thousands once the waters subside and bodies are recovered.

Maj. Louis Kirstein of the South African National Defense Force, which had five helicopter rescue teams flying Tuesday and expects to add two today, said the operation has taken a heavy emotional toll on the approximately 50 South African soldiers.

Pilots, eager to save everyone, are cramming 25 people in aircraft designed to hold six or eight, he said. They are hovering near trees and navigating between potentially deadly utility wires and television antennas. Frantic to make a speedy return, they are dropping passengers on any high ground they can find instead of making the journey to makeshift camps.

At the end of the day, with thousands of hungry and weary people still trapped and time running out, crews anguish in their hotel rooms here in the Mozambican capital over the ones they didn’t help.

“Everyone is working under tremendous strain,” said Kirstein, who acts as spokesman for the crews. “They have to make certain decisions to leave people behind. When everyone talks after work, you can really see it bothers them a lot.”

Part of the problem, relief agencies say, is that there are just 11 rescue helicopters in Mozambique, which is slightly larger than Texas. The relief effort, moreover, got a slow start because a bad but manageable disaster suddenly became much worse late last week when rainfall from upstream poured into Mozambique.

“It changed overnight,” Quintaglie said.

South African defense officials said Tuesday that it would be dangerous to add many more aircraft to the rescue operation because they would get in one another’s way.

Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano, however, said helicopters are the flood victims’ only hope.

“Only helicopters can help people who are hanging on the top of the houses,” Chissano told journalists after a tour of the worst-hit areas, where he saw bloated bodies in the still-rising flood waters. “We call for air force helicopters to see what they can do today because if they don’t do it today, there will be a loss of life, because this evening there will be no more roofs.”

In neighboring South Africa, where floods have ravaged areas near the Mozambican border, authorities reported that high water was forcing some families to keep the bodies of loved ones in their homes until roads become passable.

The cause of all the hardship was an unusual sequence of back-to-back tropical storms last month across southern Africa.

The South African Weather Bureau said rainfall in February was about six times the normal amount in areas near the Mozambican border. Climatologist Mike Laing said the monthly rainfall--about 45 inches--was the highest recorded since 1956. Forecasters said it will be several more days before the rainwater that fell in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana passes through Mozambique to the Indian Ocean.

“The wretched people in Mozambique, having survived their own floods, are now bearing the brunt of the whole collection from the catchment area of the rivers,” Laing said.

Relief organizations say they are already looking beyond the rainfall and rescues, however dramatic they may still be, to the difficult task of preventing even more deaths from disease. Malaria and cholera are already problems in many temporary shelters. Once the rescue efforts end, helicopters will be redeployed to deliver food and medicine to hard-hit areas.

UNICEF is also busy creating a system to help reunite families. MacLeod, the agency spokesman, said UNICEF plans to use digital cameras to photograph parentless children and distribute the images to villages and camps around the country. The system, he said, was a big success in locating relatives of children who survived the 1994 massacre in Rwanda that left more than 800,000 people dead.