Authorities in Congo say the death toll from floods and separate boat accidents has reached 77, with more than 100 people still missing after extreme weather battered the country.
AP reported that the toll combines two disasters. In northwestern Equateur province, three boats sank on Lake Tumba during extreme weather last Wednesday, leaving 48 bodies recovered and 107 passengers still missing, according to the Ministry of Interior. At the same time, heavy rains over the weekend triggered floods and landslides in the capital, Kinshasa, killing 29 people and submerging homes across the city.
The pattern highlights how one weather system can cascade into multiple emergencies. In Kinshasa, residents described walls collapsing and homes being swept under by floodwater. AP quoted one resident saying he heard a loud noise at about 3 a.m. and found that a neighbor’s wall had collapsed, killing the man and his wife. Local rebuilding work was already underway to repair damaged structures, including a bridge, but the scale of the damage was still being assessed.
In Equateur province, rescue and search operations were being hampered by the lack of services and a shutdown of telephone lines, according to the South Kivu provincial health minister quoted by AP. The ministry said a government delegation had been deployed to help coordinate humanitarian response. Almost 50 people had been rescued from the lake tragedy, but officials said body searches were continuing and the final toll could still rise.
The AP report places the deaths against a broader national backdrop of disaster and instability. Last month, flooding in Kinshasa had already killed 33 people, and decades of conflict in eastern Congo have worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis. That makes the current emergency not just a weather story but a governance and logistics test in a country where infrastructure and communications are already fragile.
What stands out in the latest figures is the dual nature of the disaster: one part urban, with floodwater hitting a capital city; the other rural and maritime, with boats lost on one of central Africa’s major lakes. The shared result is the same: families searching for the missing while officials struggle to coordinate response across damaged roads, interrupted phone lines and hard-to-reach communities.
The ministry said it was also working on strengthening disaster prevention and resilience plans. That is a long-term answer, but the immediate reality remains stark. Congo’s latest flood season has already produced dozens of dead in the capital, dozens more in the lake zone and more than 100 missing people whose fate is still unknown.
