Deadly mudslide warning

THE grim task of burying the hundreds of people who died in Sierra Leone’s devastating mudslide is under way on the outskirts of the capital Freetown, as the government warns residents to evacuate after a new crack opened on a mountainside with more rain forecast.

Approximately 350 people are confirmed dead and 600 remain missing from the disaster and workers are struggling through thick mud and debris of destroyed houses in the search for more bodies.

Six hundred men have been hired to dig individual graves for the victims at a cemetery that already holds victims of the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak that killed thousands in the West African nation.

“We all share the agony which has befallen the nation,” President Ernest Bai Koroma told mourners at the cemetery.

“They had their hopes and aspirations, a bright future — like the six innocent children who went to study in the home of one of their brightest colleagues, like the young man who was due to get married tomorrow, like the husband who has worked so hard to get his family a new home and had just moved them to this new and lovely home,” he said.

Dr Owiss Koroma, the government’s chief pathologist, said the confirmed death toll from the mudslide and flooding was at least 350, a third of them children. The bodies of many victims were too decomposed to be identified.

“I lost my sister and mother. The water took away my mother and sister and they have buried them today,” said Zainab Kargbo at the cemetery.