Crisis teams move to tame season of death

• Emergency workers draw up evacuation plans and stockpile drugs ahead of floods

CRC was formed by Office of the Prime Minister to coordinate drought other emergency response. The operations of the CRC are overseen by the Special Programmes ministry.

Mr Ali Mohammed, the PS at that ministry is confident that enough preparations have been made to prevent a repeat of previous disasters.

“We are ready to give both food and non food items to people especially in Budalang’i who will be displaced by floods or landslides,” he said by telephone.

Emergency teams are already in Budalang’i and have identified schools and health centres where camps for the displaced will be set up. Cooking facilities, food and mosquito nets will be provided, he said.

Col King’ori said emergency workers were devising ways of helping people to move before the rains start.

“They will be issued with tents by the Kenya Red Cross Society,” he said.

The awareness campaigns are being carried out by officials from the Special Programmes ministry with the help of the Provincial Administration.

The emergency workers do not seem to have made the same elaborate preparations in other flood-prone areas —Kano plains and Tana Delta.

Col King’ori said in places such as Garissa and Tana River, where most of the communities are pastoralists, they were only being advised to move to safer areas.

In the Kano plains, he said people could move to safer ground without assistance.

Where there is danger of mudslides, such as in Murang’a and Nandi Hills, “we are telling the people to move to safer areas like going to live with their relatives,” he said.

The biggest dangers, especially in November when rains are expected to be heaviest, are diseases. The director of Public Health, Dr Shahnaz Shariff, said more than three million chlorine tablets to areas where cases of diarrhoea and cholera are expected, to purify water in health facilities.

Teams have been sent to 18 districts in the country where highland malaria becomes widespread during such rains to spray mosquito breeding grounds.

“We have also distributed enough malaria drugs in all the medical facilities around these areas,” he said.

Mr Mohammed, who has been chairing the emergency intervention meetings, said they alerted the Livestock ministry to watch out for outbreaks of Rift Valley fever.