Mother Nature is particularly hotheaded this summer. While the effects of global warming are becoming more visible and obvious each day that goes by, with drought episodes from France to Somalia, forest fires from California to Brittany and unbearable temperatures in Western Europe, it is not only necessary but really vital to stop the rise of greenhouse gas in our everyday lives: growing more trees, putting away the car in the garage, tackling waste, reducing mass consumption, using our feet and the bike, decreasing our electricity consumption, living in an eco-friendly house, taking the plane only when necessary…We cannot do everything at the same time, but we can act responsibly and focus on one or two points. Agree?

While California and its Yosemite national park are still burning and making it hard for firemen to fight a huge and never-ending fire, Senegalese people faced up to another kind of natural disaster this week with the deadly flooding in Dakar that made one casualty (for now). Every Dakar citizen must be careful since the flooding is not over yet with planned thunderstorms and rainfalls for this weekend, but the last days were already exceptional (not in the good way) with 126 millimeters of rain that fell last Friday on the Senegalese capital city. 

Material damage was heavy with stores, houses, cars, tunnels and roads completely flooded in a country where infrastructures are making matters worse even though the lack of gutter is not a Senegalese specificity. In other African countries like Cameroon, a big rainfall can quickly turn into a flooding since there is no proper way to evacuate water. Even setting up gutters is not enough if you take a look at what happened in France, Belgium and Germany lately.

Power cuts were suffered by the inhabitants of neighborhoods Darou Salam Grand and Arafat, and the company in charge of distributing drinking water in Senegal (Sen’eau) announced that the activity of one of its factories had been interrupted to help evacuating water…Which resulted in a lack of drinking water for some people.