Baby drowns as floods hit city suburbs again
Children in Kalerwe, a city suburb walk through the floods to fetch water. Photo by Alex Esagala
KAMPALA.
The morning downpour that begun at around 6am this morning has left a two-year old baby dead in Elisa Zone, Kyebando, a city suburb.
A witness told Daily Monitor that the mother of the baby was awakened by the groaning in the wee hours of Thursday morning after floods rattled the wall of their single-roomed house. The mother could however do nothing to save the drowning baby.
The witness said the baby was sleeping on the floor, beneath the bed of its parents.
“The mother heard the baby grumbling while swallowing water from the floods. They stay in a small house built with mud and that is why the floods found it easy to breakthrough. That is the situation we are in (death of a baby),” said Mr Segirinya Muhammad, a newly elected area leader adding, “by the time the mother realized the problem, the baby couldn’t be saved.”
The body was taken to Mulago National Referral Hospital for a postmortem.
The incident has left residents of the flood-prone areas including Bwaise, Kalerwe among others in fear as no efforts are in place to control floods.
In October last year floods killed a seven-year-old girl in Ntinda, a Kampala suburb, swamped roads, submerged vehicles, felled trees and flattened mud-and-wattle houses.
The same scenario seems to be repeating itself despite warnings of flooding by several weather agencies.
Uganda now continues to experience uncertainty over the sudden changes in weather patterns.
In November last year, weather forecasters warned of a ferocious five-month El Niño rain that was expected to peak in December of the same year and persist through to February this year.
