Four people were killed and 14 were missing in floods caused by an “extraordinary” climate phenomenon in southern regions, Moroccan authorities said on Sunday.
A local official told AFP that “four people had died and 14 were missing” since heavy rains began on Friday in the Tata province, some 740 kilometres south of Rabat, adding that the death toll could rise.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said eight houses were “swept away due to flooding in some valleys” near Tamannart, a rural area in the Tata region.
Usually dry areas of southern Morocco and Algeria have been soaked by floods caused by heavy rains since Friday, officials told AFP on Sunday.
Louhoussein Yoabd, spokesman for Morocco’s General Directorate of Meteorology, told AFP that areas of southern Morocco had been hit by an “extremely unstable tropical air mass”.
He said this caused “unstable and violent cloud formations” that led to heavy rainfall.
Yoabd described the event as “extraordinary” and said the areas witnessed “heavy storms and heavy rainfall, causing rivers to flood” as “humid tropical air masses moved north”.
As a result, the Ouarzazate region received 47 millimetres of rain in three hours, and Tagouinite, near the Algerian border, received about 170 millimetres, according to the Moroccan Meteorological Service.
Heavy rains have hit areas of Morocco that have been suffering from drought for at least six years.
Meanwhile, authorities in neighbouring Algeria confirmed one person dead and another missing after floods in the south.
Algerian Civil Defence said an unnamed young woman was swept away by water in Illizi, farther south, and another person who was trapped in a vehicle was still missing.
It also said it had rescued several families stranded in flooded rivers, most of them in Illizi and Bechar in the south.
Videos posted on social media showed some areas of the Sahara Desert soaked.
Entire streets were flooded in Ouarzazate, Morocco.
“We haven’t seen rain like this for almost 10 years,” local resident Omar Gana told AFP.
Morocco is facing a severe water shortage due to six consecutive years of drought, with water levels in dams falling to less than 28 percent of capacity by the end of August.
According to the General Directorate of Meteorology, the rain was accompanied by strong winds, reaching 100 kilometres per hour in Ouarzazate and 76 kilometres per hour in Marrakech, where they “produced an optical phenomenon that turned the sky orange.”
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