N’DJAMENA, Chad (AFP) — Weeks of severe flooding in Chad have left 341 people dead and some 1.5 million affected since July, the United Nations (UN) said Monday.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the flooding had hit all of the country’s 23 provinces.

It cited government data which said some 164,000 houses had been destroyed and almost 70,000 heads of cattle lost with 259,000 hectares (640,000 acres) of fields ruined.

The government has yet to publish a breakdown of the damage wrought by the deluge which has broken over the nation of some 16 million.

Last week, 14 students and their teacher died when a school collapsed after torrential rains battered the province of Ouaddai in the semi-arid east.

By mid-August, at least 54 people had lost their lives in flooding in Tibesti province, in Chad’s desert far north.

Typically, “rainfall hardly reaches 200 mm per year” in the mountainous region, but severe rainfall does occur “every five or 10 years”, according to Idriss Abdallah Hassan, director of meteorological observation and forecasting at Chad’s National Meteorological Agency.

The UN warned last week of the impact of “torrential rains and severe flooding” in the region generally, particularly in Chad, while urging immediate action and funding to tackle the climate crisis.

More than 700,000 people have been affected by severe flooding in South Sudan, according to a September 5 OCHA tally.

This summer has been the hottest ever recorded globally with a slew of record temperatures, heatwaves, drought and severe flooding.