FASS MBAO, Senegal - The only piece of furniture that survived the most recent flood in Fatou Dione's house is her bed. It's propped up on cinderblocks and hovers just above the water lapping at the walls of her bedroom.
The water stands a foot deep throughout her house. She shakes off her wet feet each time she climbs into her bed. To keep it dry, she tries to place her feet on the same spot so that only one corner of her mattress becomes moist.
Torrential rains have lashed Africa's western coast for the past three months, killing 159 people and flooding the homes and businesses of over 600,000 others, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs.
They include the patients of one of Burkina Faso's largest hospitals who had to be carried out on gurneys after water invaded the wards. They include those living on the banks of a river in northern Niger, whose homes were swept away when a dike burst under the weight of the rain. And they also include tens of thousands of people like Dione whose homes took on a foot or less of water and whose ordeals are not a priority for the country's overwhelmed emergency response teams.
While the rains have been extreme, people are also to blame, said Col. Singhane Diagne, spokesman for the country's firefighters. The home where Dione lives should never have been built, he said. During the droughts of the 1970s, people began illegally building houses in the low-lying marshes that surround Dakar, the Senegalese capital.
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