Heavy flooding is affecting some 350,000 people across West Africa, killing at least 25 in Ghana and seven in Burkina Faso, UN officials said on Friday.
The most badly affected appears to be Burkina Faso, where 110,000 have been forced to flee their homes, mainly in the capital, Ouagadougou.
On Friday, a seven-member assessment team from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was expected to arrive in Ouagadougou. The country’s main hospital is three-quarters flooded, requiring early discharges and massive evacuations of patients, some with infectious diseases.
Benin, too, has been flooded since July, and a UN team was there assessing its needs. Also hard hit are the Western African nations of Guinea, Niger and Senegal.
Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for OCHA in Geneva, Switzerland, said the amount of rain that fell on Thursday in Ouagadougou equaled a quarter of all Burkina Faso’s typical annual rainfall.
“It was a deluge, but you also have Ghana, where 25 people died from the bad weather and from the floods,” she told UN Radio. “The death toll is likely to increase in the coming days.”
In Burkina Faso, Minister of Social Welfare Pascaline Tamini said on state radio on Wednesday that she expected the number of people affected to grow significantly in the coming hours. Burkinan President Blaise Compaore appealed to the international community for help.
Flood damages in the nation had risen to US$152 million as of Friday, Burkinan Prime Minister Tertius Zongo said.
That included a dam destroyed and 12 bridges damaged in Ouagadougou and a dam destroyed in the northern Sahel region.
The rain in Ouagadougou last week was the worst in recent memory, but heavy rain two years ago caused flooding throughout the country, killing 84 people and displacing 146,000.
Local authorities have been forced to open the main gate of a hydroelectric dam in the Volta River basin, near the Ghana border, threatening people in both countries with additional flooding, the UN said.
When the state-run electricity company opened the dam’s gate on Friday morning, the water was less than 8cm from reaching the dam’s capacity, said Venance Bouda, the firm’s director of hydroelectric power.
“Even when we operate normally and release water, some people drown while crossing [the river] downstream,” Bouda said. “Cultivated land on the reservoir’s shores and further upstream will be flooded. We warn riverside residents to stay away from the shores.”
It is only the sixth time since the dam was built in 1994 that it has had to be opened — an instance two years ago caused flooding in parts of northern Ghana.
Ghanaian officials told the UN they had less than a day’s notice before the gate was opened, but that no one could have expected the rainfall to fill the reservoir so quickly.
SILICON VALLEY HUB: The office would showcase Taiwan’s strengths in semiconductors and artificial intelligence, and help Taiwanese start-ups connect with global opportunities Taiwan has established an office in Palo Alto, one of the principal cities of Silicon Valley in California, aimed at helping Taiwanese technology start-ups gain global visibility, the National Development Council said yesterday. The “Startup Island Taiwan Silicon Valley hub” at No. 299 California Avenue is focused on “supporting start-ups and innovators by providing professional consulting, co-working spaces, and community platforms,” the council said in a post on its Web site. The office is the second overseas start-up hub established by the council, after a similar site was set up in Tokyo in September last year. Representatives from Taiwanese start-ups, local businesses and
EXPRESSING GRATITUDE: Without its Taiwanese partners which are ‘working around the clock,’ Nvidia could not meet AI demand, CEO Jensen Huang said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and US-based artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Nvidia Corp have partnered with each other on silicon photonics development, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said. Speaking with reporters after he met with TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) in Taipei on Friday, Huang said his company was working with the world’s largest contract chipmaker on silicon photonics, but admitted it was unlikely for the cooperation to yield results any time soon, and both sides would need several years to achieve concrete outcomes. To have a stake in the silicon photonics supply chain, TSMC and
‘DETERRENT’: US national security adviser-designate Mike Waltz said that he wants to speed up deliveries of weapons purchased by Taiwan to deter threats from China US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed his commitment to peace in the Taiwan Strait during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Hegseth called China “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security” and said that he would aim to limit Beijing’s expansion in the Indo-Pacific region, Voice of America reported. He would also adhere to long-standing policies to prevent miscalculations, Hegseth added. The US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was the first for a nominee of Trump’s incoming Cabinet, and questions mostly focused on whether he was fit for the
INDUSTRIAL CLUSTER: In Germany, the sector would be developed around Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s plant, and extend to Poland and the Czech Republic The Executive Yuan’s economic diplomacy task force has approved programs aimed at bolstering the nation’s chip diplomacy with Japan and European nations. The task force in its first meeting had its operational mechanism and organizational structure confirmed, with Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) the convener, and Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) and Minister Without Portfolio Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) the deputy conveners. Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) would be the convener of the task force’s strategy group in charge of policy planning for economic diplomacy. The meeting was attended by the heads of the National Development Council, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the
RSS