The vice-president of the National Committee for Flood Prevention and Management, Mahamat Assileck Halata, said that only in the last week 146 persons died and a total of 1.7 million others have been affected.

Halata said that the rains left some 200,000 houses and more than 355,000 hectares of crop fields destroyed, while 66,000 head of cattle were lost.

Logone Oriental and Mayo-Kebbi West, in the south of the country, and Ouaddaï and Wadi Fira, in the east, as well as the Lake province in the west, are among the worst damaaged, the Halata said.

Recently, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) warned that the lack of resources and the onset of the rainy season threatened the management of humanitarian action in Chad, the country with the largest number of Sudanese refugees fleeing the war in their nation.

In eastern Chad, one in three persons is a refugee, which is an unsustainable situation for that nation, already considered among the poorest in the world.

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