Searches are carried out by smell, or by following the scavengers who fly over the mounds of trees and mud. In Kenya, around a hundred people are still missing around Mai Mahiu, a town in the Rift Valley, around fifty kilometers from the capital Nairobi, where a landslide caused by torrential rains claimed the lives of at least fifty inhabitants, Monday April 29.
Lost in his thoughts, Edward Kinenji takes part in the hunt along the ocher-colored river. Stick in hand, he scans the thick mud where uprooted acacia trees, monkey corpses and car wrecks lie pell-mell. Upstream, a water reservoir which had formed over the months around a disused railway tunnel gave way under the pressure of the rains. The torrent swept away a section of the mountain on Monday night, then hundreds of homes downstream.
“The water surprised us at 3 a.m., I was able to rescue my wife and my children, but I lost everything else: my hundred head of cattle and my house”, confides Edward Kinenji from the flooded banks, where the army is deployed to find the bodies of the missing. A flood of this magnitude is unprecedented in the region, assures Edward Kinenji, who has raised his goats there for fifteen years and has never experienced anything like this.
Read also | In Kenya, the death toll from floods rises to 188 deaths since March
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Makarios Kamariu, a neighbor, was unable to warn his family in time when the water rushed down the slope. “The outbuilding in which my two teenagers lived was swept away before my eyes, I found their bodies 300 meters below the next morning”says this father.
One of Kenya’s worst disasters
The violent rainfall that has hit East Africa for a month and a half is, in some regions, three times higher than seasonal norms. If the landslide that occurred in Mai Mahiu is one of the worst disasters that Kenya has experienced, the floods there have caused at least 188 victims and displaced 200,000 people since the start of the rainy season in March.
After a first violent episode in November 2023, when the rains had already caused the death of 250 people and displaced a million people in East Africa, Kenya once again finds itself powerless in the face of these floods. The heavy precipitation is the consequence of two parallel phenomena: the El Niño weather event and the Indian Ocean Dipole, another climate anomaly – when the water surface temperature of the Indian Ocean is higher than the normal to the west of it and below normal to the east.
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