A large concentration of orange water is forcibly crossing an unusual place: the Algerian desert. Several people watch its passage while the current damages some of the houses scattered on the arid land. Some adobe houses cannot withstand the humidity and their walls begin to collapse. These are part of the images transferred from the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf (Algeria), where torrential rains suffered this Sunday and Monday have caused severe flooding in the Dakhla camp, the largest refugee camp in Algeria. district The Saharawi Red Crescent is the most isolated of the Algerian hamada, which provides shelter to thousands of people after Spain abandoned Western Sahara and the subsequent occupation by Morocco. According to the Saharawi Red Crescent, around 350 families have been forced to leave the camps to safer places.
Several videos released by the Red Crescent show large concentrations of water which, in contrast to the arid terrain, flow past some of the precarious adobe houses while damaging some of them, which are beginning to collapse. The authorities of the wilaya – the neighbourhoods into which the Sahrawi refugee camps are divided – and the Sahrawi Red Crescent are currently assessing the damage on the ground. To make a first assessment of the emergency situation, a delegation made up of UN agencies and NGOs from Dakhla arrived on Monday morning, the Red Crescent reported in a statement. The population living in the Sahrawi refugee camps depends on humanitarian aid.
“The Sahrawi Red Crescent calls on donors and humanitarian organisations to provide urgent and emergency assistance to the Sahrawi refugee populations in Dakhla,” the statement warned. The houses that remain standing after the storms are also not safe. As they are built of adobe, the houses can collapse when the mud dries.
Over the past few weeks, the rains in this area of the desert have affected other wilayas into which the Sahrawi refugee camps are divided. “It should be noted that the other camps have also suffered rains during the past week, and several infrastructural damages have been recorded: in houses and public facilities,” the organisation says.
At the beginning of September, the prediction made by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and advanced by elDiario.eswas fulfilled in several desert regions of North Africa, where rains were recorded for several days reaching up to 50 liters per square meter in some areas.
In Morocco and Algeria, torrential rains left nearly twenty dead and nine missing, as well as destroying homes and infrastructure related to drinking water and electricity. In the Sahrawi camps, bread could not be delivered for many hours because communications were blocked.
“The electricity has been cut off, my mother and her neighbours are here. They say it will rain until 5am, which has us a little worried. At the moment, it hasn’t stopped,” Khadya, 26, explained to this newspaper from El Aaiún, another of the Sahrawi refugee camps in southern Algeria. During the early hours of the morning before the rains, she and her family were preparing with flashlights and charged mobile phones for an unusual scenario predicted by meteorologists a few days before: heavy rain in the Sahara desert, well above the annual average.
Source: www.eldiario.es
