More than 100 dead after flooding in eastern DR Congo, officials say

The victims were mostly children and elderly people, with an additional 28 injured.

Heavy overnight floods have washed away several villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing more than 100 people, according to local officials, in a nation suffering war and mass displacement.

The floods were triggered by torrential rains and surged through the Kasaba village, in South Kivu province, during the night of Thursday into Friday, regional official Bernard Akili told news agency AFP on Saturday.

Torrential rains caused the Kasaba River to burst its banks overnight, with the rushing waters “carrying everything in their path, large stones, large trees and mud, before razing the houses on the edge of the lake”, he said.

“The victims who died are mainly children and elderly,” he said, adding that 28 people were injured and some 150 homes were destroyed.

Sammy Kalonji, the regional administrator, said the torrent killed at least 104 people and caused “enormous material damage.”

South Kivu’s provincial health minister, Theophile Walulika Muzaliwa, told the Associated Press news agency that rescue operations were hampered by a lack of services and a shutdown of telephone lines due to the flooding.

“Sector chiefs, village chiefs and locality chiefs, who are also members of the local government, are on site. The only humanitarian organisation currently present is the Red Cross,” he said.

A local resident told AFP that some 119 bodies had been found by Saturday.

Such natural disasters are frequent in DR Congo, particularly on the shores of the Great Lakes in the east of the country, as the surrounding hills are weakened by deforestation. In 2023, floods killed 400 people in several communities located on the shores of Lake Kivu, in South Kivu province, while last month, 33 people were killed in flooding in the capital, Kinshasa.

DR Congo has also been subject to decades of fighting between government troops and rebels in the eastern part of the country, which escalated in late January when the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group captured Goma, the capital of North Kivu state, in a rapid and surprise offensive.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed and 2,880 injured in the Goma offensive, worsening what is already considered one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with more than seven million people remaining displaced.