ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — A dam burst in northeastern Nigeria on Tuesday, triggering severe flooding that forced evacuations and washed deadly reptiles from a zoo into communities in the region, local officials and a zoo director said.
The failure of the Alau Dam in Borno State caused some of the worst flooding since the same dam failed 30 years ago, forcing many residents to flee their homes. According to the state government, the dam was at full capacity due to unusually heavy rainfall.
About 15 percent of Borno state’s capital, Maiduguri, is under water, Nahum Daso, the state’s police spokesman, told the Associated Press. The number of deaths from the floods has not yet been announced.
In the Borno State Museum Park, about 80 percent of the animals died as a result of the flooding, while an unspecified number of reptiles escaped, said zoo director Ali Abatcha Don Best.
“Some deadly animals have been washed into our communities, animals like crocodiles and snakes,” the zoo director said.
Local authorities have issued a flood warning and an immediate evacuation order for residents near the river, said Usman Tar, Borno’s commissioner for information and internal security. All schools in the state will be closed for the next two weeks, he added.
The dam collapse exacerbates a humanitarian crisis in Borno that has been caused by the activities of Boko Haram rebels for a decade. The insurgency, which has spread across borders around Lake Chad, has killed more than 35,000 people in the northeast of the country and displaced 2.6 million people.
Boko Haram, one branch of which is allied with the terrorist militia “Islamic State”, wants to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria, the West African oil giant with 170 million inhabitants, which is almost evenly divided into a predominantly Christian south and a predominantly Muslim north.
Earlier this year, at least 18 people were killed by suicide bombers in a coordinated attack on a wedding, a funeral and a hospital in Borno.
