MAJURO – There’s been widespread flooding in Marshall Islands after a king tide battered the shores of several islands, including the capital Majuro.

Several homes and the atoll’s air strip have been inundated with water, forcing people to relocate as the cleanup gets underway.

It’s not the first tide like this in the past year, nor will it be the last, with forecasts predicting more in the coming week.

Foreign minister Tony De Brum has seen the damage on Majuro, and says the tides have caused disruption throughout the islands.

“The waves that have come in on the north shore of the island have done severe damage to the homes along that coast and also affected the airstrip there.

“The people have been evacuated to the south side of the atoll and are staying in elementary school there, so we have had to close the school for the next few days.”

Locals are being warned there could be more seawater flooding over the next week.

Marshall Islands Coastal Management Extension Agent Karl Fellenius says the reason the weekend’s risk of flooding is higher is due to predicted wave swells from the northeast.

Acting Chief Secretary Justina Langidrik says they’ve received reports from the remote islands of Kili, Utrik and Ailuk of inundation from the high tide, and were provided photos of flooding on Mejit.

RNZI correspondent, Giff Johnson, says Wednesday’s tidal surges have left a big clean-up job for residents in the capital where inundation by the sea is becoming a regular event.

“Sometimes they put an alert out and we see very little – and other times it’s serious, so it’s very hard to know.

“Usually the high tide itself doesn’t always cause flooding, but when it’s in conjunction with other weather events then we tend to see flooding – it just depends how bad it is on the weather conditions and the height of the tide.

“But I think since these events have become, I guess semi-regular, I mean we are having several a year now – so you know people are more aware of this occurrence.”

“Normally the Marshall Islands gets the highest tides each year at the end of January and the end of February. That’s our moon phase that always brings high tides. And the tide that we saw earlier this week, was like that.

“I mean we’ve got this weekend and then next weekend and then another couple of days in February that are already on people’s radar as possible flooding times.

“And over the years we have had regular flooding this time of the year in different parts, not just Majuro, but some of the remote other islands.

“It usually seems to depend on what kind of weather conditions there are surrounding the high tides. So if we have a storm somewhere that has kicked up wave swells, that often is enough to create flooding or if there’s if there are high winds things like that.

“The ocean water simply washes right over the shore, rolls right across the island and in bad inundation incidences, it could be as much as half a metre of water washing across the road, into people’s houses.

“It isn’t like a tsunami or waves crashing, you know, big high waves hitting the island because the reef breaks up the waves.

“But it’s just this inexorable tide and it’s just, for a couple of hours, you know as it’s coming up to the peak high tide and as it’s going back down it just keeps rolling in.