With Colombia’s winter in full force, record-breaking rainfall continues to drench the country, leaving three people dead in the Huila and Cundinamarca departments.
In the central department of Cundinamarca, in the town of Giradot, two hours outside of Bogota, a mudslide swallowed a house, killing a women and her child, and causing three other families to evacuate their homes out of fear, reports El Tiempo on Wednesday.
In another town named Giradot, in the central Colombian Huila department, a farmer was killed Wednesday, when a gorge overflowed, causing a flood that destroyed the area he was working. The flood also destroyed a 28 hectacre coffee field, a building that housed over 1,000 chickens, two houses, a pedestrian bridge, and several vehicles.
Last week in Giradot, which is one of the most heavily affected areas of the country, 94 families lost their personal possessions when the streams and rivers flooded their homes.
In Bogota, the local government declared a health emergency as a preventative measure, reports El Nuevo Siglo.
The government of Bogota is encouraging public and private health care providers to strengthen their response capacity by taking measures to increase their number of beds, amount of physical spaces used to tend patients, amount of staff, and material needed to care for patients with respiratory illnesses.
With the rains come the end to the drought and wildfires that have plagued Colombia over the last few months.
Colombia experienced a particularly dry period in the first months of 2010, due to the El Niño phenomenon. Drought scorched the Colombian countryside, and unusually high temperatures of over 40 degrees were recorded around the country