At least 44 killed after dam bursts in Kenya
NAIROBI, Kenya — Villagers said it started with a loud rumble, then houses collapsed one by one under an approaching wall of water.
“We took our children and rushed to higher ground,” farmer Joseph Maina told The Associated Press. Their home was submerged and their crops were washed away, but unlike dozens of others, they survived.
At least 44 were dead and another 40 were missing Thursday after a dam swollen by weeks of seasonal rains burst in Kenya’s Rift Valley, sweeping away hundreds of homes and sending people fleeing, officials said.
At least 20 of the dead were children.
“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 — a cluster of villages about 110 miles northwest of the capital, Nairobi — on Wednesday night was the deadliest single incident yet in the seasonal rains that have killed more than 170 people in Kenya since March.
Local reports said the failed structure was a privately owned earthen dam on a large farm.
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 1¼ miles were submerged. Officials said that thousands of people had been displaced.
“The water has caused huge destruction of both life & property,” Lee Kinyanjui, governor of Nakuru County, where the disaster occurred, wrote on Twitter. “The extent of the damage is yet to be ascertained.”
He visited two villages “that were swept away,” he wrote later. “We assure residents that we are doing our best to evacuate affected families to safety and assist victims get medical attention.”
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.
“There are two other dams which are leaking,” one resident, Stephen Nganga, said. He asked the government to investigate them for the residents’ safety.
Nakuru County Gov. Lee Kinyanjui said water from one of the other dams will be discharged to avoid a disaster and that a village near that dam will be evacuated.
More than 225,000 people in Kenya have been displaced from their homes since March, according to the government.
The flooding is the worst in Kenya since 2012, said Marshal Mukuvare, the regional disaster management delegate for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.