When Julia Wanjiku put her son Isaac to bed last Sunday, after a day celebrating his third birthday, she didn't realize she was also saying goodbye.
In the early hours of Monday morning, Wanjiku woke up after hearing screams from her neighbors. A fierce river of muddy water flowed into the town of Mai Mahiu, about 50 kilometers north of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. When the water hit, Wanjiku's husband tried to hold his son, but he couldn't – Isaac was taken away.
“We still don’t know where our son is,” Wanjiku told CNN . She was among survivors who gathered at Ngeya Girls High School in Mai Mahiu on Tuesday. Supported by her mother and aunt, she cried as she said she was at least grateful to have survived. Isaac's father was too devastated to speak.
Flooding in Mai Mahui claimed the lives of at least 52 people, 18 of whom were children.
It was a tragedy that echoed other cities in Kenya, including Nairobi and parts of the famous Maasai Mara wildlife reserve. The result of weeks of intense rain, which caused flash floods and caused the death of at least 210 people. The rains left more than 90 people missing and displaced another 165,500 residents.
Kenya is used to heavy rain at this time of year – the long rainy season runs from March to May – but this has occurred on a scale not seen for years.
For just two days in early May, it rained more than normal for the month in some parts of the country.
Experts say the rain was intensified by a mix of two natural weather patterns – El Niño and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, also known as the Indian Ocean El Niño, when warmer waters are pushed westward across the Indian Ocean – as well as by the underlying trend of human-caused global warming.
Despite the huge impact the floods have already caused, the worst may yet be to come as rain continues to fall on already saturated land and swollen rivers.
“Weather reports predict a dire picture,” said Kenyan President William Ruto. The country is also preparing for the impacts of what would be the first cyclone that could hit the country, Hidaya. The phenomenon moves towards the coast of neighboring Tanzania.

Many people's lives have been upended
On Thursday, Quonia's Interior Secretary Kithure Kindiki announced that 178 dams and reservoirs “could overflow at any time,” and ordered people living near them to leave their homes or risk being evicted. the power. Government spokesman Isaac Mwaura said around 100,000 people were affected.
Schools, which were closed during the floods, will remain closed “until further notice”, the president announced. Some are being used as shelters for the displaced.
People in informal settlements are particularly hard hit, said Mark Laichena, director of strategy at the Kenyan grassroots organization Shining Hope for Communities, which works in urban slums.
“Drinking water has been contaminated, healthcare is scarce and the food supply has been washed away or spoiled,” he told CNN . “These floods are on a scale of destruction that we haven’t seen in recent years.”
From a multi-year drought to deadly floods
The government has created more than 50 shelters across the country to provide shelter to the displaced and plans to increase this number, Mwaura said. It is also distributing food and other essential supplies. Foreign aid is also coming — the UAE has pledged 80 tons of food aid.
However, as the scale of the catastrophe increases, the population's anger at the pace of the government's response and the lack of information about what happens to those who are forced to flee increases even more.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nonprofit, criticized the government's action in a statement. It stated that the Kenyan government “failed to implement a national response plan in time”, despite warnings from the Kenya Meteorological Department as early as May 2023 that El Niño would intensify the country's rainy seasons.
“The ongoing devastation highlights the government’s obligation to prepare for and respond promptly to the predictable impacts of climate change and natural disasters,” said Nyagoah Tut Pur, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
As the world warms, the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events is predicted to increase, as a warmer atmosphere can retain more moisture, making dramatic floods more likely.
Heavy rains also affected other East African countries, including Tanzania, where at least 155 people died.

The president's spokesman strongly rejected criticism of the government, saying they were doing the best they could with the resources they had at hand. “We can never be fully prepared for these humanitarian crises,” he said.
He emphasized that the conversation should really be about climate change and who is most responsible. “Western countries are causing havoc” by warming the Earth and African countries are paying the price, he said, despite accounting for less than 4% of global levels of planet-warming pollution.
Kenya, a country firmly on the front lines of the climate crisis, has gone from a devastating, multi-year drought – which scientists say has been made at least 100 times more likely by climate change – to deadly floods.
“When people are still suffering from one extreme weather event, it makes them highly vulnerable to another,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
The vulnerability is starkly clear in Mai Mahiu. The city is still full of traces of the disaster: piles of tangled furniture, twisted metal sheets torn from the roofs of houses and overturned vehicles. Residents are still trying to remove bodies from the mud.
The people here are mainly subsistence farmers and market traders. Many, like Githukuri Makau, a goat herder who is sheltering at Ngeya Girls High School, escaped the floods with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Makau said his house was destroyed by the floods. He doesn't know what he will do when school reopens and he needs to find a new place to stay. “Now I am destitute,” he said, “there is nowhere to go, there is no one to turn to.”
Larry Madowo participated in Mai Mahui and Laura Paddison participated in London. CNN's Louis Mian, Allison Chinchar and Mary Gilbert contributed to this report
Source: CNN Brasil

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