Four dead, 14 missing in Morocco flooding

Moroccan authorities on Sunday said four people died and 14 were missing in flooding caused by an “exceptional” climate phenomenon in southern areas.

“Four people have died and 14 have gone missing” since heavy rains began on Friday in the province of Tata, some 740 kilometres south of Rabat, a local official told AFP, saying the toll could potentially rise.

“Eight houses were washed away by floods in some valleys” near Tamanart, a rural area in the Tata region, said the official, who did not wish to be named.

Usually arid areas in southern Morocco and Algeria have been drenched in floods caused by massive rainfall since Friday, officials told AFP on Sunday.

Areas in southern Morocco have been affected “by an extremely unstable tropical air mass”, the spokesman for the Moroccan General Directorate of Meteorology, Lhoussaine Youabd, told AFP. This “led to the formation of unstable and violent clouds” that caused massive rainfall, he said.

Youabd described the phenomenon as “exceptional” and said the areas saw “heavy thunderstorms and significant rainfall, leading to river flooding” as “humid tropical air masses moved northward”.

As a result, the Ouarzazate region received 47 millimetres of water in three hours and Tagounite, near the Algerian border, received some 170mm, according to the Moroccan weather service.

The heavy rains hit regions of Morocco that have been suffering from drought for at least six years.

In neighbouring Algeria, authorities meanwhile confirmed one person dead and one missing in flooding in the south.

Algerian civil defence said an unnamed young girl was swept away by the waters in Illizi, in the far south, and another person who was trapped in a vehicle was still missing.

It also said it had rescued several families trapped by flooded rivers, mostly in Illizi and Bechar, also in the south. Videos posted on social media showed that some areas in the Sahara desert were drenched.

In Morocco’s Ouarzazate, entire streets were flooded. “We haven’t seen such rain for about 10 years,” Omar Gana, a local, told AFP.

Morocco has been experiencing severe water stress after six consecutive years of drought, shrinking dam levels to less than 28 per cent of capacity by the end of August.

The rains were accompanied by strong winds, reaching up to 100 kilometres per hour in Ouarzazate and 76 km/h in Marrakesh, where they caused “an optical phenomenon, giving the sky an orange tint”, according to the General Directorate of Meteorology.