Dam if you do, dam if you don't: politics and floods in the shadow of COVID-19 in Sudan

Abstract

The season of rampaging floods, which usually lasts from June to October, started in Sudan while the country was grappling with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The massive flooding in September 2020 created a suitable environment for other epidemics and diseases at a time when the country had yet to recover from the damages of the July 2020 floods caused by the collapse of the Bout Dam in southeastern Blue Nile due to heavy rains. The floods in September 2020 were the worst to hit the country in this century, breaking all previous recorded floods. They impacted about 500,000 people in all 18 states of Sudan with 140 fatalities and injuries, displacing most and causing total or partial collapse of more than 100,000 houses and at least 2,671 health facilities. Due to the large-scale damage, the government was forced to institute a state of emergency for 3 months and declared the country a natural disaster zone.

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This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2020.0223

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/311395/