DAKAR, Senegal — Recent floods in Ivory Coast have resulted in at least 59 fatalities, a government spokesperson said Wednesday.
Speaking after a cabinet meeting, Amadou Coulibaly told reporters that “the council deplores the particularly high death toll of 59 this year.”
On Monday, floods and landslides triggered by days of torrential rain in the capital cities of Ghana and Ivory Coast left at least 24 people dead and left many others missing.
Coulibaly did not specify how many of the deaths were directly attributable to the most recent flooding in Ivory Coast.
Entire buildings and roads were submerged in Accra, Ghana, on Monday, cutting off access to several areas of the Ghanaian capital and its neighboring city of Tema.
In Ivory Coast, several days of rain brought flooding that left more than a dozen people dead, most of them in the municipalities of Attécoubé and Yopougon in the capital, Abidjan, according to the Minister of National Cohesion, Myss Belmonde Dogo.
Coulibaly urged residents to follow safety guidelines and vacate areas designated as high risk by the government.
Deadly floods are common in parts of Africa, a continent among the world’s most vulnerable to extreme weather events despite contributing only a small fraction of global greenhouse‑gas emissions, according to the World Meteorological Organization.