Damcollapse sends deadly wall of water downstream

‘‘Many people are missing. It is a disaster,’’ said Rongai town police chief Joseph Kioko.

The bursting of the Patel Dam in Solai, Nakuru County, on Wednesday night local time, was the deadliest single incident yet in the seasonal rains that have killed more than 170 people in Kenya since March. The floods hit as the East African nation was recovering from a severe drought that affected half of the country.

Almost an entire village was swept away by silt and water from the burst dam, said Gideon Kibunja, the county police chief in charge of criminal investigations. Officials said homes over a radius of nearly 2km were submerged.

Forty people have been reported missing, Regional Commissioner Mwongo Chimwanga said, while about 40 others were rescued from the mud and taken to local hospitals.

The area has seven dams used by a commercial farm, said Keffa Mageni, an official with an advocacy group that helps to resettle displaced people. With the heavy seasonal rains the dams do not have an outlet, he said.

‘‘There are two other dams which are leaking,’’ one resident, Stephen Nganga, said.

He asked the government to investigate them for the residents’ safety.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi, visiting the scene, said the government had launched investigations to determine the stability of the other dams.

Nakuru County Governor Lee Kinyanjui said water from one of the other dams would be discharged to avoid a disaster and that a village near that dam would be evacuated.

More than 225,000 people in Kenya have been displaced from their homes since March, according to the government.

Military helicopters and personnel in the past week have been deployed to rescue people marooned by the flooding.

The dam burst has again raised concerns about the state of Kenya’s infrastructure. The National Construction Authority in the past has blamed contractors bypassing building codes to save on cost.

In April 2016 a residential building in the capital, Nairobi, collapsed during rains, killing 52 people. Last May the wall of a hospital collapsed due to rains, killing six people in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa. – AP Congo’s minister of health yesterday announced the first death since a new Ebola outbreak was declared in the country, as well as nine other cases of people sickened by a haemorrhagic fever that is suspected as Ebola.

Health officials declared an Ebola outbreak in the country’s northwest on Wednesday after lab tests confirmed the deadly virus in two cases from the town of Bikoro in the Equateur province. Officials from the World Health Organisation and other international health agencies are in the area to help contain the outbreak’s spread.

Seven people with a hemorrhagic fever, including two confirmed cases of Ebola, were hospitalised in Bikoro as of yesterday, according to Health Minister Oly Ilunga. The death happened overnight at a hospital in nearby Ikoko Impenge hospital that also reported four new suspected cases of Ebola, Ilunga said.

Ilunga told The Associated Press that the patient who died was a nurse. Three other nurses also were being treated for a hemorrhagic fever, he said.

The minister clarified with The Associated Press that testing still must be done in nine cases, and equipment to conduct rapid testing on the patients has been dispatched.

‘‘This situation worries us and requires a very immediate and energetic response,’’ he said at a news conference.

The two Ebola cases were confirmed as the Zaire strain after officials in the capital, Kinshasa, were alerted early this month to the deaths of 17 people from a hemorrhagic fever and travelled to the Bikoro area to perform tests.

The deaths occurred over a period of time and Ebola, which is not the only virus responsible for hemorrhagic fevers, has not been confirmed as the cause in any of the 17 cases, Ilunga said.

Bikoro Hospital director Dr Serge Ngalebato said earlier yesterday that nurses at the hospital were among the five suspected Ebola cases there.

‘‘We have isolated the patients,’’ Ngalebato said. ‘‘There are no deaths yet, but all of the sick are presenting signs of fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain and intense fatigue.’’

This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976, when the deadly disease was first identified.

There is no specific treatment for Ebola, which is spread through the bodily fluids of people exhibiting symptoms.

Without preventive measures, the virus can spread quickly between people and is fatal in up to 90 per cent of cases.

The director of the National Institute of Biological and Bacterial Research, Dr Jean Jacques Muyembe, said that health experts should be able to quickly contain this outbreak because the area is so remote. – AP