Heavy rains have caused building collapses that have killed 17 people in northern Sudan, as the country recovers from nearly 16 months of fighting between rival security forces, AFP reported.
"The death toll has risen to 17," said a hospital official in Abu Hamad, a small town in Sudan's River Nile state, about 400 km north of Khartoum.
There is no electricity in the city and people spend the night outdoors, fearing more rain.
About 11,500 houses have already collapsed, the country's infrastructure minister Samir Saad said on August 6, and at least 170 people have been injured.
Every year in August, the Nile's peak flows are accompanied by torrential rains that destroy homes, destroy infrastructure and take lives, both directly and indirectly through water-borne diseases.
The fallout is expected to be worse this year after more than 12 months of fighting forced millions of displaced people into flood zones.
"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 phone.
Last week, a flash flood killed five people in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast.
Heavy rains and floods have killed more than 30 people across the country since July 7, Sudan's federal emergency operations center said on Tuesday. According to the United Nations, since June, rains and floods have displaced more than 21,000 people - mostly in areas already affected by heavy fighting. Aid groups have repeatedly warned that access to humanitarian aid, already hampered by the war, is now almost impossible in remote areas as with roads flooded. Sudan is facing what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis in recent times, as fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Force shows no signs of abating. More than 10 million people have been forced to have left their homes and the main battlefields are on the brink of total starvation. | BGNES
