US helps Mozambique prepare for, and recover from, floods
Chokwe, Mozambique — When a 20-foot deep blanket of water unleashed by a cyclone swept across the vast, low-lying plains along the Limpopo River in 2000, Jaime Mussa, 47, fled into a tree with his wife and children.
“I was terrified—it was the first time I saw something like this,” he said recently as he tended his restored clothing shop in the market here. “That day, God gave me the strength to get to the tree. There were snakes and garbage in the water.”
Helicopters brought his family to high ground as hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and about 800 died.
Yet when another flood spread across the Zambeze River plains north of here in 2007, an emergency response plan supported by USAID and the Mozambique government rushed 113,000 people to high ground before lives could be lost.
“USAID mainly helped with the early warning system—this was very important and saved lives,” said João Ribeiro, director general of the National Disaster Institute in Mozambique.
In an interview, he said that flooding hit the Zambeze region again in 2008 “that was worse than 2000, but we could warn people in time and moved 89,000 people” to safety.
A visitor can readily see the risk people face in Mozambique. A few hours’ drive north of Maputo, the land suddenly drops about 100 feet and unrolls flat as far as the eye can see, pierced by rivers heading towards the ocean. When these rivers flood, there is no nearby high ground to run to.
Ribeiro’s institute has—since 2000—set up a way to cope with floods. He receives reports from USAID’s Famine Early Warning System (FEWSNET) that uses satellite imaging to spot rising flood waters. Then he sends out alerts to even the most distant rural families through community radio stations.
With advance warning, people can bring their goats and other animals with them to prepared high ground sites. USAID supplies plastic sheeting for shelters, mosquito nets, water purification, and other emergency supplies.
Other donors have provided rubber boats and bicycles so trained emergency workers could spread the alarm of flooding.
In the long run, said Ribeiro, the government plans to resettle people on higher ground where they could switch to arid land crops and leave the lowlands for grazing.
USAID also gave cash grants to 115,000 people affected by the 2000 floods. A helicopter flew in the cash after waters destroyed the bridge over the Limpopo.
Rosa Valenti Machava, 55, showed visitors her three small mud huts in the community of Josina Island—rebuilt after the floods with a $100 USAID grant. A neighbor used her U.S. grant to buy clothes and school books for her five children.
At the Rosa D’Ouro Bakery in Chokwe, 36 workers kneaded and shaped balls of dough for the tasty brown rolls coming out of an oven. The business was restored with a USAID loan after 20 feet of water swamped the business in 2000. Some $25 million in loans to 250 businesses was given out and then repaid.
The railroad leading from Maputo to the Zimbabwe border also was rebuilt with USAID funding after the floods undercut the road bed. Now the daily train to Zimbabwe leaves Maputo Station around 1 p.m. each day.