Deluge adds to flood as disaster unfolds

A week after Cyclone Idai lashed southern Africa, flooding still rages as torrential rains caused a dam to overflow in Zimbabwe, threatening riverside populations.

The confirmed death toll in Zimbabwe, neighbouring Mozambique and Malawi surpassed 500 yesterday with hundreds more feared dead in towns and villages that were completely submerged.

Aid agencies and several governments continued to step up their deployments, with helicopters in short supply, for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the cyclone. World Food Program spokesman Herve Verhoosel told reporters in Geneva the Marowanyati dam in Zimbabwe was hit by heavy rains overnight, putting populations in the region at risk. Zimbabwe’s defence minister said more than 120 bodies had been washed into neighbouring Mozambique and more bodies were still being recovered in rivers, raising the official death toll in the country to at least 259.

‘‘Most of the bodies were washed into Mozambique and because they were in a really bad state, they ended up burying them,’’ defence minister Oppah Muchinguri said.

Mozambique’s environment minister, Celso Correia, said yesterday the confirmed death toll in his country was 242, and an untold number were still missing.

‘‘Don’t create panic,’’ Correia urged other government officials as more updates on the devastation trickled in. He said some 65,000 people had been saved by rescue workers who plucked them from rooftops and trees.

Correia said the most worrying issue now was health, with cholera a major concern. He said a much bigger rescue and recovery mission must be launched in the region of some 350,000 people, where many remain marooned.

It will be days before Mozambique’s inundated plains drain toward the Indian Ocean and even longer before the full scale of the disaster is known.

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi has said as many as 1000 people could have died in his country alone but even that huge number is likely to pale in comparison to reality, aid workers said.

‘‘Now that the water is receding, we fear that we will see even more,’’ the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Elhadj As Sy, said.

Homes, villages and entire towns were submerged across central Mozambique, where flooding created a muddy inland ocean 50 kilometres wide. The United Nations food aid agency said 400,000 people were displaced and ‘‘in urgent need of life-saving assistance’’ in Mozambique’s coastal city of Beira and flooded areas along the Pungue and Buzi rivers.

In Malawi, where at least 56 people died, the government reported more than 920,000 people were displaced by the floods.