The Kenya National Disaster Operation Centre

Floods occur due to natural factors like flash floods, river floods and coastal floods. They may also occur due to human manipulation of watersheds, drainage basins and flood plains. For example, in some cases floods have occurred in the river basins even with normal rains because of excess surface water run off occasioned by deforestation, land degradation upstream.

Kenya is affected by floods following torrential rainfall. These force thousands of people living in the lowlands to move to higher grounds. The people affected are mostly in western and Nyanza provinces and in Tana River district. However slum dwellers in towns like Nairobi who have erected informal structures near rivers are not spared. In Western Province, river Nyando is notorious bursting its banks during the rainy season.

Kenya’s record of flood disasters indicates the worst floods recorded in 1961-62 and 1997-98, the latter ones being the most intense, most widespread and the most severe. During this season the flooding was associated with the El Nino phenomenon, a weather pattern that affects most parts of the world. El Niño is a disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific having important consequences for weather around the globe. It may cause increased rainfall in some areas and drought in others thus changing the normal weather pattern.

The problem has been perennial each time taking back years of development and costing the government millions of shillings in reconstruction and recovery. Each year several people are reported dead or injured necessitating action to curb the menace.

Most parts of the nation experience river floods which are slow onset and mostly predictable. However some parts experience more severe floods than others including most parts of Kano plains (Nyando district) and Nyatike (Migori district) in Nyanza province, Budalangi in Western province resulting from river Nzoia and the lower parts of Tana River.