UN responds to severe flooding in Sudan

(New York: 8 August 2003) United Nations agencies and their non-governmental organization (NGO) partners are responding to needs created by heavy flooding in northwestern Sudan. Floodwaters from the River Gash have swept through the town of Kassala in northwestern Sudan, some 280 kilometers northwest of the capital, Khartoum, and left two thirds of its 500,000 inhabitants homeless.
The floods and rainfall have severely affected 100,000 people, and damaged or destroyed some 16,000 houses. As of 5 August, 13 deaths and 56 injuries have been confirmed. Electricity supply has been interrupted, and hospitals and health care facilities have stopped functioning. Relief assistance was impossible to deliver to the area for two days, due to poor road conditions. As roads have become passable, relief supplies are being rushed in by land and air.

Two inter-agency needs assessment missions were dispatched to Kassala, and have identified food, clean water and shelter as priorities. UNICEF and WHO are providing health, water, and sanitation supplies as well as mosquito nets, while WFP is preparing a food distribution targeting 30,000 people. The UN has established an emergency cell in Khartoum and assigned an Area Coordinator to Kassala. As a forecast for further rains threatens to impede relief operations, a UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) Team will be deployed to help coordinate the response both in Khartoum and the flooded areas.

The UN, in cooperation with the Government of Sudan and NGOs, is preparing a Flash Appeal for the funding to assist 100,000 people and enable agencies to replenish the stocks diverted from other programmes to respond to the flood crisis. The Appeal will also cover other flood-affected areas of Sudan including White Nile, River Nile State, Gezira and Khartoum.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which is supplying food to 3.2 million beneficiaries throughout Sudan, has expressed concern that the current shortfall in funding (only $40 million was received in response to the agency's Appeal for $130 million) will limit their ability to respond to new needs.