The only piece of furniture that survived the most recent flood in Fat Dione's house is her bed. It's propped up on cinderblocks and hovers just above the water lapping at the walls of her bedroom, AP reported. The water stands a foot (more than 30 centimeters) deep throughout her house. She shakes off her wet feet each time she climbs into her bed. To keep it dry, she tries to place her feet on the same spot so that only one corner of her mattress becomes moist. Torrential rains have lashed Africa's western coast for the past three months, killing 159 people and flooding the homes and businesses of over 600,000 others, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs. They include the patients of one of Burkina Faso's largest hospitals who had to be carried out on gurneys after water invaded the wards. They include those living on the banks of a river in northern Niger, whose homes were swept away when a dike burst under the weight of the rain. And they also include tens of thousands of people like Dione whose homes took on a foot or less of water and whose ordeals are not a priority for the country's overwhelmed emergency response teams. While the rains have been extreme, people are also to blame, said Col. Singhane Diagne, spokesman for the country's firefighters. The home where Dione lives should never have been built, he said. During the droughts of the 1970s, people began illegally building houses in the low-lying marshes that surround Dakar, the Senegalese capital. When the drought ended and the rains returned, these bowl-shaped neighborhoods began to flood. «Every year we pump the same houses. Not just once. Over and over. You pump the water out _ and it comes right back. Like a boomerang,» says Diagne. «These people need to leave.» Among the six countries where the flooding has been most severe _ Senegal, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Ghana _ the neighborhoods most affected are the poor ones. Typically these communities are the result of urban sprawl, built without municipal approval, using unsafe materials. In Ouagadougou, the hard-hit capital of Burkina Faso, many of the flooded homes were made of nothing more than clay. In Senegal, the government has built a satellite community of around 150 homes outside the flood plain, but the homes are already nearly full. The U.N. estimates that just in Senegal, 264,000 people have been affected by flooding. And although many families say their homes flood every year, they say that they do not have the money to move.
