Freight still moving after deadly Malawi floods

In what is likely to be one of 2015’s deadliest natural disasters, the two weeks of cyclonic rainstorms which have hit Malawi and Mozambique and triggered rampaging f loods, have had no major impact on freight road transport in the two nations, according Barney Curtis, CEO of the Federation of East and Southern African Road Transport Associations (Fesarta). Not that Fesarta is denying that it has been a devastating event. The death toll from flooding in the central and northern parts of Mozambique was reckoned to be 71 at the beginning of last week, according to that country’s National Institute of Disaster Management. Also, about 80 000 people had been rendered homeless by the f loods. Meanwhile, across the border in Malawi, 176 people had been killed and 200 000 displaced by f loods. And, according to Dr Jeff Masters’ “Weather Underground” website, the international disaster database EM-DAT reported that only one other f lood disaster has killed more people in Malawi: the f loods of March 10, 1991, with a death toll of 472. That ’91 f lood was also the most expensive weather-related natural disaster in Malawi’s history, with damages estimated at US$24m. “The f loods of 2015 may be ten times more expensive,” said EM-DAT, with Malawi having already requested humanitarian assistance of US$430m for recovery efforts. But, although numbers of roads have been damaged, and bridges and causeways washed away in both countries, Fesarta has had no incoming reports of badly disrupted truck traffic. “It must be moving, or we would have heard,” Curtis told FTW. The only logical explanation, he added, is that the main trunk routes across both countries are probably built on a higher level than the stretches of ground prone to f looding – many of which are alongside main rivers.