Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Monday that this year’s heavy rainy season is set to “last until next March.”
This statement came after the president visited zones affected by the heavy rains in the Cundinamarca department of central Colombia.
“In 16 months, in government, [the rainy season] has been the worst problem we’ve had to fight,” declared Santos.
The president said that the Office for Risk Management allocated $22 million to counter the rainy season, which killed 117 and affected more than 430 thousand since it began in September.
“Other calamities, like the guerrilla or unemployment, we are beating, but this [rainy season] we are still struggling,” Santos added.
Santos also said that the director of the Colombian Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies, Juan Ricardo Lozano, was to travel to South Africa to ask developed countries to work to prevent global warming.
Lozano will travel to Durban next week to join the international climate conference.
The head of state said it was necessary to maintain all the alerts until February or March 2012.