By that stage, the Nyabarongo and Akagera rivers had carried thousands of genocide victims downstream into the lake, particularly affecting Uganda’s shoreline districts of Rakai, Masaka and Mpigi.
Authorities said the situation had become impossible to manage locally. Bodies were reportedly arriving on the Ugandan coast at a rate of nearly 80 every hour.
Residents who had initially tried burying victims in shallow graves along beaches could no longer cope, while stray animals began disturbing burial sites.
Officials feared a major outbreak of cholera, typhoid and dysentery across the Lake Victoria region.
The government’s formal declaration on that Sunday allowed emergency measures to be implemented immediately without waiting for lengthy legislative procedures.
Uganda simultaneously appealed to international relief agencies, foreign governments and the United Nations for urgent support, warning that the scale of the disaster had overwhelmed national resources.
One of the most immediate measures introduced was a strict quarantine on the lake’s economy.
Fishing and fish sales from Lake Victoria were banned, with health inspectors and local defence units deployed to markets in Kampala, Entebbe and Masaka to confiscate catches.
The Ministry of Health also warned residents not to drink, cook with or wash using lake water, saying it had been contaminated by decomposing remains despite boiling attempts. The order triggered severe shortages of clean water at landing sites along the shoreline.
The declaration also formalised “Operation Kimaka”, the coordinated military and public health response tasked with body retrieval and sanitation. Before then, local fishermen had been recovering corpses using bare hands and ordinary fishing nets.
Following May 22, state supplies including rubber gloves, overalls, masks, boots, disinfectants and formalin were delivered to affected areas. Tractors and trailers were also deployed to transport bodies from beaches to higher ground away from the water table.
The government simultaneously abandoned makeshift individual burials in favour of organised mass graves. Large burial operations were established at heavily affected landing sites including Kasensero and later Ggolo, where thousands of victims were laid to rest in deep treated graves overlooking the lake.
Although the emergency measures helped prevent a wider regional epidemic, the social and economic damage lasted for months.
Fishing communities along the northern shores of Lake Victoria suffered heavily as the industry collapsed temporarily, while the trauma of the crisis remained etched into local memory. Many of the burial grounds created during the operation still stand today as memorial sites to one of the darkest humanitarian tragedies ever witnessed in the region.