The death toll from heavy rains and flooding in Kenya’s capital Nairobi and elsewhere has nearly \u200bdoubled to 42, the government said in a \u200cstatement issued late on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Intense rains on Friday unleashed heavy and widespread flooding, causing some people to drown, washing away vehicles \u200band disrupting traffic at the country’s largest airport.<\/p>\n
Emergency workers from various \u2060agencies including the military were still conducting search \u200band rescue operations across the country, Geoffrey Kiringa Ruku, \u200bMinister for Public Service and Human Capital development said in the statement.<\/p>\n
“Search mission is still in progress by the multi agency emergency \u200bresponse teams with the aim of ensuring that \u200bbodies of all the flood victims are found and retrieved,” he \u200csaid.<\/p>\n
The \u2060floods had also done extensive damage to infrastructure and livelihoods. But 172 vehicles that had been swept away by flood waters have been recovered.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, President William \u200bRuto said he \u200bhad ordered relief \u2060food from the country’s national strategic reserves be immediately released for distribution to families \u200baffected by the floods.<\/p>\n
Scientists say global warming \u200bis \u2060worsening floods and droughts across East Africa by concentrating rainfall into shorter, more intense bursts. A 2024 World Weather \u2060Attribution \u200bstudy found climate change had made \u200bdevastating rains in the region twice as likely as before.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22780,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-28083","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"","published_date":"","news_description":"","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/28083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/28083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28084,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/28083\/revisions\/28084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=28083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}