By Ruth Maclean and Ismail Alfa

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Aishatu Bunu, an elementary schoolteacher in Maiduguri, a city in Nigeria’s northeast, woke up at 5 a.m. to the sound of her neighbours shouting.

When she opened her front door, she was greeted by the sight of rising waters outside. “We saw — water is coming,” Bunu said.

In a panic, she and her three young children grabbed some clothes and her educational certificates and fled their home into waters that quickly became chest-high, eventually finding temporary shelter at a gas station.

Bunu was speaking Friday (13) from the bed of a truck that she managed to board with her children after several days of sheltering at various sites across the flood-stricken city. The floodwaters inundated Maiduguri early last week after heavy rainfall caused a nearby dam to overflow.

Flooding caused by the rain has devastated cities and towns across West and Central Africa in recent days, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Up to 4 million people have been affected by the floods and nearly 1 million forced to flee their homes, according to humanitarian agencies.

The exact number of deaths has been difficult to tally given the scale of the disaster, and the officially reported figures are not up-to-date. In Nigeria, authorities said that at least 200 people had died, but that was before the floods hit Maiduguri, which has added at least 30 people to that toll. In Niger, more than 265 have been reported dead. In Chad, 487 people had lost their lives as of last week. In Mali, which is facing its worst floods since the 1960s, 55 died.

The first night after they fled their home, Bunu said she and her children, Zara, Ahmed and Fatima, slept in a gas station. The next morning, they sought shelter in the grounds of a research institute, where they stayed for two days, sleeping in the open, surrounded by water.

Apart from a few peanuts, they had no food. Bunu said she did not think she would survive.

Scenes of devastation could be seen across Maiduguri on Friday. Dead people and animals floated past. People were trapped in schools and on rooftops. Some slept on the highway.

Over the weekend, many people were rescued across the city after being trapped by the floodwaters for days. The ground floor of the main hospital was submerged, destroying vital equipment, samples and the polio laboratory.

Rising waters swept crocodiles and deadly snakes out of the zoo and into communities, while 80% of the zoo’s animals drowned, according to a statement from Ali Don Best, general manager of the Borno State Museum Park, where the zoo is.

In Nigeria and in most of the region, the floods are hitting communities already racked by conflict, displacement and poverty. Even worse flooding is forecast for later in the year.

Although Africa produces only a fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, Africans bear an exceptionally heavy burden from climate change, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

And adapting to it will cost sub-Saharan Africa $30 billion to $50 billion annually over the next decade, or 2% to 3% of the region’s gross domestic product, it said.

“The impact of climate change is what we’re witnessing right now,” said Olasunkanmi Okunola, a scientist whose study focuses on flood risk management and climate adaptation. “There’s no way we can prevent major disasters from happening, but there are steps we can take to lessen the effect.”

He pointed to early warning systems and improving countries’ infrastructure, like drainage systems and roads.

In the Sahel, the arid strip just south of the Sahara, the problem is not usually an abundance of water, but lack of it. Decades of desertification and multiple failed rainy seasons have frequently led to drought.

That is the case in Zinder, a city in southern Niger, where last week a treasured historic mosque caved in as a result of heavy rains, captured in a resident’s video.

“The collapse is a tragedy for all Muslims in Niger and around the world,” said Macky Rabiou, an imam at the mosque, which was built in 1810.

Everybody in Zinder was grief-stricken, said Hakimin Fada, a worshipper at the mosque whose parents and grandparents had also prayed there.

“No one slept without feeling the pain,” he said. “Although we acknowledge it as Allah’s destiny, and we have to accept destiny, we can’t help but feel profound sadness.”

In neighbouring Mali, Mariam Diallo, a housekeeper, said her family had spent nights trying to empty their house of water. They protected the grain they had for food, but “the water took all our shoes,” she said.

Baba Faradji N’Diaye, an environmental expert based in Mali’s capital, Bamako, said people had built everywhere, including in the river beds.

“Of course, it’s a natural disaster, but it’s also happened because of anarchic practices,” he said. And the problem will only increase as the city’s population does, he said.

“Everyone wants to move to Bamako,” he said.

In Nigeria and across the region, there is a severe lack of funding to deal with the immense humanitarian crisis. In Nigeria, for instance, the United Nations has less than half of the $927 million it says it needs to save lives by providing food and clean water and preventing disease.

As the floods lingered in Maiduguri, the only two bridges that link the city’s eastern and western halves began to make strange noises. Cracks appeared.

Then, on Thursday one bridge collapsed, followed by the other on Friday, splitting the city in half with no access from one side to the other.

Half of Maiduguri is now underwater.

Friends and family members are trying to rescue one another, using canoes or trucks to access cut-off areas.

Bunu, the teacher, and her children were on one of those trucks Friday, along with dozens of other women and children. They were all famished, having eaten barely anything since the floods hit.

As the truck made its way out of the waterlogged area in the pouring rain, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives threw two loaves of bread to the people in the truck.

The women split the loaves among the children, giving each child a few mouthfuls.

From her spot on the bed of the truck, Bunu’s head was bowed in thought. Occasionally, she looked up at the sky. She had no idea how her daughters from a previous marriage, who were staying with her sister, had fared. She tried calling but couldn’t get through.

And the flood had swallowed the family’s means of survival — their sheep, goats and chickens — as well as every household item they possessed.

“I don’t have anything now,” she said.

When they finally reached a camp, a nongovernmental organization gave them some water and food: half a can of sardines and half a loaf of bread per person.

It wasn’t clear what would happen next.

-New York Times