The toll is provisional and is likely to increase in the coming hours: at least 55 people died in Kinshasa on Tuesday, December 13, in floods caused by heavy rains, according to figures communicated to AFP by General Sylvano Kasongo , chief of police in the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

These floods also caused significant material damage and submerged in the early morning to the main streets of the center of the megalopolis of approximately 15 million inhabitants.

According to General Kasongo, the victims are counted in different districts and communes of the city, in particular in valleys where houses have been destroyed by landslides.

Among the dead are nine members of the same family, including young children, killed in the collapse of their house in the Binza Delvaux district of the Ngaliema commune of Kinshasa.

An AFP journalist had seen their bodies lined up on the ground in the morning after being extracted from the rubble. 

Residences "swept away" in erosion

“Around 4 a.m., we were awakened by water entering the house,” said a relative of the family.

"We channeled the water and, thinking there was no longer any danger, went back into the house to sleep, we were soaked," he added.

The family went back to bed and "right after, the wall collapsed". 

Heavy rain overnight paralyzed the Congolese capital.

The rain notably caused a landslide in a peripheral district, cutting off the national road 1 which leads west.

"In the erosion, residences were swept away," Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde told reporters on the spot, referring to "twenty deaths".

"The search through the rubble" continues, he said.

This road, essential to the supply of the city, connects the capital to the river port of Matadi, between Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean.

This subsidence of the roadway occurred in the hilly commune of Mont-Ngafula, where frequent landslides are caused by the rains and aggravated by anarchic urbanization.

"Backfilling work has already started," said the Prime Minister.

Small vehicles may be able to hit the road within 24 hours, he said.

For the trucks, you need "civil engineering work which can take three to four days", he estimated.

"We have lost all the belongings of the house"

In town, the small rivers, canals and sewers overflowed, flooding the streets including in Gombe, one of the 24 municipalities of the city-province, which is generally the most spared from the daily galleys of the people of Kinshasa, between lack of electricity , piles of rubbish and recurrent flooding.

This district is home to ministries and embassies.

In November 2019, around forty people died in Kinshasa, victims of torrential rains which had caused floods and landslides.

Mont-Ngafula had been one of the most affected communes. 

"We have never seen a flood of this magnitude here," testified to another AFP journalist Blanchard Mvubu, a resident of the CPA Mushie district of this commune of Mont-Ngafula. 

"People build big houses, it clogs the gutters, the water does not pass freely, that's what causes the floods", he believes, asking the State to intervene, so that " the houses built on the gutters are destroyed". 

"It's a disaster, we have lost all the belongings of the house," he adds.

Not far from there, in the morning, a young boy asks passers-by for a small ticket to take them across the street on his back.

Same scene closer to the city center, in the town of Lingwala, opposite the Academy of Fine Arts, where the young Djuma transports passers-by on the back of a man. 

Walking in the dirty waters that flooded his avenue, Freddy meanwhile assures that he is not in a hurry to empty the large amount of water that has entered the family home.

"The waters have risen, everything is under water: shoes, food supplies, clothes. Everything is lost, there is nothing to save," he says.

With AFP

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