MAPUTO, 14 January 2008 (IRIN) - Water levels in the major rivers of central Mozambique are continuing to rise after three days of heavy rain in neighbouring countries, officials at the National Centre for Emergency Operations warned on Monday.

More than 10,000 affected families have been evacuated to resettlement centres in the central provinces of Tete, Sofala and Zambezia, amid fears that flooding in the Zambezi River Valley could worsen over the next 48 hours. Mozambique's rivers are fed by rainfall in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

On Friday, the Mozambique News Agency (AIM) reported that floods in the Zambezi basin were already worse than those that ravaged the region in February 2007, and said that two of last year's resettlement areas on higher ground in Mutarara district were evacuated over the weekend.

Two broken rescue boats, problems with radio communications, food shortages in camps in Zambezia Province, and the accidental distribution of chlorine for water treatment that was past its expiration date, have hampered the current evacuation and resettlement process.

The provincial government of Zambezia has since distributed 10 tons of maize to the affected camps, but officials could not say with certainty whether the chlorine supplies had been replaced.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) announced on Monday that it was working with government health authorities, the Mozambican Red Cross, and development agencies to scale up its response to the flooding and prevent outbreaks of malaria and cholera.

UNICEF has also partnered with the child rights group, Save the Children, and education authorities to distribute school supplies and tents in preparation for the 2008 school year, which begins at the end of January. According to the agency, flooding has damaged 47 schools in the region.

Officials at the government's disaster management agency (INGC) estimated that over 37,000 hectares of cultivated land has also been lost. Although the World Food Programme has been distributing food in the region since the floods in 2007, spokesman Peter Keller-Transburg said the situation could worsen.

"Food has gone out, but mainly at this point we're working with INGC to identify the hardest hit areas," he said. "We're expecting it to get worse as people move and lose what they have in storage as well as their crops."

A bulletin from the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS) postulated that central Mozambique now faced two potential outcomes: a repeat of last year's flooding, when peak water levels were sustained for a relatively short 15 days, or a repeat of the disastrous floods of 2001, when flood-level waters lingered for 45 days.

INGC officials were more optimistic about the situation in the Buzi and Pungoe river basins in central Sofala Province, and along the Limpopo River further to the south, saying water levels there were expected to remain stable for the near future.

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