A dam broke Sunday due to torrential rain, wiping out at least five villages in eastern Sudan, leaving behind an undisclosed number of casualties and devastating a region already reeling from months of civil war.
Incessant rain has caused the Arbaat Dam, just 40 kilometers from Port Sudan, the de facto capital and seat of government, to overflow. Diplomats, aid agencies and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons have also gathered in this city.
“The area is unrecognizable. Power lines and water pipes were destroyed,” Omar Eissa Haroun, the head of the Red Sea State water company, said in a WhatsApp message to employees. Haroun reported seeing corpses of gold miners and objects used in their work washed away by the mudflows. He even compared this disaster to the one that took place in Derna in eastern Libya last year in September, when the waters of a storm broke dams, collapsed many buildings and killed thousands of people.
On the road to Arbaat today a Reuters reporter saw people burying a man and covering his grave with driftwood, trying to protect him from the mud.
“The city is in danger of going thirsty”
This dam was the main source of water for Port Sudan, home to the country’s largest port on the Red Sea as well as its operational airport. “The city is at risk of going thirsty in the coming days,” the Union of Sudanese Environmentalists said.
Officials said the dam had begun to collapse and silt was building up after several days of steady rain, which this year came earlier than usual.
Sudan’s dams, roads and bridges were already in disrepair even before the war between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Reaction Force broke out in April 2023. Both sides have since thrown all their available resources into the war, neglecting infrastructure .
Some people fled their flooded homes in the five damaged villages and headed for the mountains, where they are now stranded, the health ministry said.
Earlier, the government reported that 132 people have been killed by floods across the country during the rainy season. Two weeks ago, the death toll stood at 68. At least 118,000 are displaced, according to United Nations agencies.
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