DAKAR, 5 September 2007 (IRIN) - As Mauritania tries to recover from floods that totally submerged the southeastern town of Tintane in early August, more recent rains have caused additional damage in other regions of the country.

Heavy rains on 29-31 August have affected hundreds of families in the southern regions of Gorgol and Assaba. Dozens of families have been made homeless, according to preliminary information from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the government's Commissariat Chargé de la Protection Sociale et de la Sécurité Alimentaire (CCPSSA).

Exact numbers are still difficult to come by, as the authorities are currently visiting affected regions to assess the situation.

One person was found dead in Gorgol, Mbout Department, after being washed away, according to the CCPSSA. Five schools are now serving as temporary shelter for the displaced in the departments of Kaedi and Mbout. The government has already begun distributing food, tents and blankets in those two departments and will transport aid by boat to the department of Maghama, which has become inaccessible by road because of the rain.

In Assaba, around 100 families have been affected in the village of Barkeol, and at least 97 homes were destroyed in the municipality of Kankossa, according to the CCPSSA.

Bogus aid claimants in Tintane

Still, the damage does not compare to that in the valley town of Tintane, at the foot of the El-Aguer mountain chain in Mauritania's Hodh El-Gharbi Region, where two people died and more than two-thirds of the population lost their homes after flooding at the beginning of August.

"A whole city - its entire population - is still flooded. It's a sea," said one official in the government's civil protection service, who was not authorised to speak.

He said some of the people who have lost everything have not yet received any aid because of the "massive influx" of people unaffected by the floods who identified themselves as victims in order to get free supplies.

"Some people have received tent distributions 10 times, while others haven't received anything at all," he said.

While the governor of the region and UN agencies agree they have struggled to differentiate victims from non-victims, they say all those who requested assistance have received it.

Tintane's food market destroyed

Three weeks after the flooding of this small trading town, serious problems continue.

"School starts in three weeks and we have six out of seven primary schools totally submerged in water," Amadou Abou Bâ, governor of Hodh el Gharbi Region, told IRIN. An assessment by UN agencies on 11-14 August found all public and private infrastructure in the town - including the health centre, banks, pharmacies, mosques and the water decontamination system - flooded.

The latest census says 3,164 families (15,820 people) in the town and neighbouring villages have lost everything, although the authorities say the number is not very reliable, and is more realistically somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 families.

In addition, the WFP says the government has identified another 10,000 people who will no longer have easy access to food as Tintane was a thriving commercial marketplace for southeastern Mauritania.

"Many people depended on the Tintane market and now find themselves with difficulty accessing food," said Nicole Jacquet, WFP's deputy country director in Mauritania, adding that the closest market is 70km away.

WFP distributes aid

The UN's rapid needs assessment in mid-August described a people "totally surrounded by water that reached the rooftops of houses" and a town destroyed on all fronts.

"The magnitude of this flooding is such that the consequences on the populations and the infrastructures are enormous," the UN said in its assessment.

Seventy percent of people in Tintane are merchants who can no longer work, because flooding has stopped all commerce, the assessment found. The other 30 percent are farmers, who have lost all their livestock and whose crops are at risk.

The assessment also found that 19 percent of children under five are either moderately or severely malnourished.

The WFP is now supplementing the government's food distribution in order to cover those in need for the first three months. The Mauritanian government has also received several responses to its call for help reconstructing the town, with several foreign governments making donations. However, the region's governor worries aid will soon fizzle out.

"Practically all the donors distributed aid at the same time. Some families sold parts of their rations they didn't need," Bâ said. "But we will not be in a 'normal' situation for at least 6-9 months. [In the coming months], we will have problems because our food stocks will be insufficient."

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