Peruvians, familiar with El Nino, steel for heavy flooding

With water marks still staining the walls from past disasters, residents of Peru's northern city of Piura are building makeshift barriers, digging trenches and abandoning ground floors as they brace for the return of El Nino.

The latest cycle of the El Nino weather phenomenon is billed by United Nations experts to be stronger than ever this time around.

With torrential rain forecast for November, Piura's 600,000-strong population is scrambling to stave off the worst effects of impending flooding.

Sara Castillo has bade farewell to the lower part of her home in favor of higher ground.

"We live on the second floor. That's where we took shelter because, as they say, where else are we going to go?" the 83-year-old retiree told AFP in the middle-class El Chilcal neighborhood.

Castillo has borne witness to the damage wrought by previous iterations of El Nino, which raises surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and causes global changes in winds and rainfall as well as erratic weather conditions.

Damp stains measuring up to 1.5 meters on the walls of her home serve as a reminder of brutal past events.

A sheet of plywood attempts to conceal the damage in the living room, where power sockets are tacked up unusually high.

Castillo recalls the particularly disastrous 1983 El Nino, which caused 512 direct deaths and 8,500 indirect deaths in Peru, official data shows.

Her niece, who lives with her, contracted a brain infection that left her "unable to speak or hear," which Castillo blames on dirty water in the aftermath of the flooding.

- 'Everything is a river' -

Nearby, municipal workers toil against the clock to clear huge masses earth of crowding the Piura River.

Mounds of vegetation dwarf their construction equipment.

But the mammoth task is an important one, as swaths of the city face a deluge if the waterway overflows.

A foul stench meanwhile winds through the streets due to clogged drains in dire need of attention.

"If they don't clean the drains, the risk of flooding is more than likely," warned Juan Chira, a community leader who lost much of his belongings to flooding in 2017.

Over in the Santa Margarita neighborhood, community leader Ana Bobbio says many locals are building retaining walls.

"In the rainy season, everything is a river," Bobbio told AFP under an unusually scorching sun for this time of year.

- Too late -

Piura's mayoral office had spent just 36.8 percent of its annual disaster risk reduction budget of $645,000 by Wednesday, according to the economy ministry.

Mayor Francisco Cevallos says the procurement process is to blame for the delay.

Eight pieces of heavy machinery are working "24 hours" a day, Cevallos told AFP.

Of the 1,800 municipalities that make up Peru, almost 800 have declared a state of emergency over the "imminent danger" posed by extraordinary rainfall.

A further 600 municipalities are on alert due to droughts potentially affecting food supplies.

President Keiko Fujimori swore to prioritize El Nino preparations when she took office in July.

Visiting Piura in August, the right-wing leader announced $41 million to clean up the region's rivers.

But time has run out for prevention, according to Marina Farias, a hydrology expert at the University of Piura, who instead calls for "mitigation."

Cleaning up "isn't going to help much," she said, adding that the more essential task of preemptively diverting water flows into the surrounding desert "isn't being done."