GENEVA - Tens of thousands of people fled their homes and many others were affected by floods in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia resulting from heavy rains in East Africa, U.N. officials said Friday.

People cross the Mrima river along the Mombasa-Tanzania highway, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006 after the bridge was washed away by heavy floods last week. Up to 1.8 million people have been affected by floods in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia resulting from heavy East African rains, U.N. officials say.[AP]

Houses have been washed away, and farmland has been flooded, said Elizabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.

The flooding has seriously disrupted aid programs feeding children still malnourished after the 2005-06 drought, said Michael Bociurkiw of the U.N.'s Children Fund.

"The crisis has significantly worsened in the last week," Bociurkiw said. "Thousands of poor farming families now find themselves sleeping outside in the cold, exposed to malaria and other diseases."

The long drought left the region's soil so dried out that it was unable to absorb the rains when they arrived, and the wet season has been unusually long, making the problem worse, Byrs said. According to experts, Somalia could experience the worst floods in 20 to 50 years, she said.

Some 50,000 people were left homeless by floods that completely engulfed the central Somali town of Belet Weyne, capital of the Hiran region, and another 15,000 people there were cut off, OCHA said in a statement.

In southeastern Kenya, a dam in the Tana River District was near breaking point, threatening to flood the surrounding inhabited area, Byrs said.

A hippo that went berserk after finding itself in the western Kenyan town of Busia because of the floods killed six people, she told The Associated Press.

Aid workers have been handing out food, shelter materials and tens of thousands of mosquito nets in flood-affected areas, she said. But U.N. officials said it was difficult to reach some affected areas because bridges and roads had been washed away.

According the U.N. refugee agency, more than 78,000 refugees have lost their dwellings in eastern Kenya's Dadaab region, with three camps being cut off by the floods.

"This week's floods washed away much of the road leading to Dadaab from the provincial capital at Garissa, completely isolating the massive camps" housing mainly Somali refugees, said Ron Redmond of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Emergency supplies were to be airlifted from Nairobi to the region on Sunday, he said.