South Africa's Karoo region has always been parched - it means land of thir...
GRAAFF-REINET, South Africa - South Africa’s Karoo region has always been parched - it means land of thirst in the language of its earliest inhabitants, the Khoisan hunter gatherers.
As the dry spell entered its fourth year, tap water turned brown and smelled like rotting fish. When the water behind the Nqweba Dam dried up, depositing tens of thousands of dead fish onto cracked earth, queues began forming at municipal bore holes and farm animals died in their hundreds. An abnormally hot summer with rainfall 75% below average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has struck the whole region. The United Nations says 45 million people in southern Africa face hunger.Bushes and trees clinging to the Karoo’s rocky ravines are withered and grey - even hardy acacia thorns are dying. Signs mark rivers that are now dry beds.More than a third of his couple-thousand goats and sheep had either died or been sold this year.
“The house is really smelling,” she said, inside her one-room brick-and-tin home. “Everyone is paining from stomach aches and diarrhoea.” Gideon Groenewald, a geohydrologist for the charity, uses science and spirituality to look for groundwater. When he was growing up on a farm, he used to dowse with wet twigs. Nowadays he prefers magnetic detectors.
The charity has drilled 1,800 boreholes in the past three years, Groenewald said, only a third of them dry.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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