Extreme weather hits DRC
KINSHASA: Paulin Bolumbu thought his family lived a safe distance from the Congo River, but in November the water overran its banks by more than half a kilometre, inundating his corrugated iron house.
“The river often bursts its banks but it never came up to this level,” said Bolumbu, clambering across wooden planks he had installed to create a makeshift floor above the flood water for the family’s beds and clothing.
A television and radio were stacked higher still atop a wooden cabinet.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of several central African countries hit by severe flooding in recent months, which researchers have attributed to increasingly intense and unpredictable weather linked to global warming.
Flooding in November in the capital Kinshasa led to landslides that killed 39 people. The rains can be deadly in other ways, too.
Henry Bofason said two of his children died of typhoid on December 29 and January 2 because of unsanitary conditions in the church where they and 700 others had taken shelter.
“The children are always sick here because the environment is not healthy,” Bofason said, seated next to his son’s coffin alongside his wife and his remaining five children.
In the Manzenze and Ngewele neighbourhoods, residents say the flooding is the worst in 15 years, keeping dozens of city blocks underwater for the past two months.
Hundreds of residents have abandoned their homes altogether. Paulin, a motorcycle taxi driver who didn’t give his last name, now ferries clients by canoe around canals choked with leaves and plastic bottles.
John Wacou, the operations manger for Congo’s national meteorology agency, said the floods were the result of climate change coupled with poor drainage and other infrastructure in Kinshasa, a city of 12 million people.
Heavy rainfall in Congo’s northern rainforest swelled the Ubangi River, a tributary of the Congo, in October and November.
“Climate change can manifest itself in an increase in the frequency or the intensity of meteorological phenomena,” Wacou said.