# Flooding in eastern Congo kills 62 along Lake Tanganyika
Heavy flooding after torrential rain has killed at least 62 people and left 50 missing in eastern Congo, according to authorities cited by AP.
The floods swept through villages along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in South Kivu province, washing away the village of Kasaba in the Ngandja sector at about 5 a.m. Friday, witnesses said. The report says the disaster followed torrential rains and that the casualty count could still rise because body searches were continuing.
South Kivu provincial health minister Théophile Walulika Muzaliwa said rescue work was hampered by a lack of services and by telephone lines being shut down because of the flooding. He said sector, village and locality chiefs were on site, alongside the Red Cross, but that the situation still made a full assessment impossible.
The AP report also places the event against a wider backdrop of disaster and conflict in Congo. Flooding last month in Kinshasa killed 33 people, and the eastern part of the country is already suffering one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises because of long-running fighting between government forces and rebels.
That wider instability matters because it makes emergency response harder. In places where roads, communications and local institutions are already stretched, a flood can become a much larger catastrophe. In this case, officials said rescue teams lacked the ability to quickly assess the extent of the damage because the most basic lines of contact were down.
The report does not identify every missing person or all the affected settlements, but it makes clear that the scale was substantial and the destruction spread beyond a single hamlet. The flooding washed away multiple villages, and witnesses described a sudden surge that tore through the area in the early morning.
For the people living along Lake Tanganyika, the immediate priority is finding the missing and restoring contact with isolated communities. For provincial authorities, the challenge is documenting the full toll while dealing with a landscape where homes, roads and communications have all been damaged at once.
The AP account shows how rapidly seasonal rain can turn lethal in eastern Congo, especially in areas that are vulnerable to landslides, river overflow and poor infrastructure. With the death toll already in the dozens and more people still unaccounted for, the event is likely to deepen pressure on local and national emergency services.
The report is a reminder that in the eastern Congo, weather disasters are rarely isolated from the region’s broader instability. When roads wash out and communications fail, the human cost can climb quickly even before the final numbers are known.
