Freetown: Rescue workers have unearthed 499 dead bodies since last week’s devastating landslide near the Sierra Leone capital Freetown, the city’s chief coroner said.
One of Africa’s worst flooding-related disasters in years occurred when the side of Mount Sugar Loaf collapsed on August 14 after heavy rain, burying parts of Regent town and overwhelming relief efforts in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Volunteers handle a coffin during a mass funeral for victims of heavy flooding and mudslides in Regent at a cemetery in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Churches across Sierra Leone held special services Sunday in memory of the hundreds killed. Photo: AP
Authorities this week buried 461 bodies in quickly-dug graves in the nearby Waterloo cemetery, near the site of a mass burial for victims of the Ebola crisis that killed 4000 people in the former British colony between 2014 and 2016.
Thirty-eight more bodies were found on Sunday, said chief coroner Seneh Dumbuya, bringing the official death toll to 499. They were being sent for immediate burial, he said.
The Red Cross said on Friday that over 600 are still missing.
An increasingly desperate search continues on the steep hillside under the wet red mud, as the likelihood of finding survivors was all but extinguished.
Authorities said they were concentrating on digging up bodies to stop fluids from contaminated corpses getting into the water supply and spreading disease.
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“We are doing all we can to ensure cholera does not break out,” said Samuel Turay, an official at the Health Ministry.
The Sierra Leone government has begun burying the hundreds of people killed in mudslides last week. Photo: AP
The threat of deadly landslides is growing in west and central Africa as rainfall, deforestation and urban populations rise, experts say.
On Thursday, a landslide in remote eastern Congo crushed the mud houses of a lake-side fishing village, potentially killing more than 200 people, a local official said.
Volunteers search for bodies from the scene of heavy flooding and mudslides in Regent, just outside of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown last week. Photo: AP
The landslide struck the village of Tora, on the shores of Lake Albert, a seismically active zone in the western Rift Valley, on Thursday.
“There are many people submerged whom we were unable to save,” Pacifique Keta, the vice governor of Ituri province, where Tora lies, said. “The rescue is very complicated because there are mountains everywhere, which makes it very difficult to have access.”
Survivors of deadly mudslides in Sierra Leone’s capital vividly described the disaster as President Ernest Bai Koroma says the nation is in a “state of grief”. Photo: AP
Reuters
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