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 MAPUTO, Mozambique (AP) - Soldiers and relief workers using helicopters and canoes have evacuated some 60,000 people from the flooded Zambezi River Valley in central Mozambique, where more than 100,000 others are at risk, officials said Monday.
Prime Minister Luisa Diogo ordered the forcible removal of people in low-lying areas amid reports that some peasant farmers were refusing to evacuate unless their cattle and goats also were rescued.
Some 100 people have drowned or been electrocuted and hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes in torrential rains that have swamped a swath of southern Africa from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the east with Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe in between. Bridges have collapsed, power lines been torn down and roads swept away.
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