Death toll rises in Freetown after floods, mudslide

At least 312 people were killed and more than 2,000 left homeless when a mudslide and heavy flooding hit Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, on Monday, leaving hospitals struggling to cope.

An AFP journalist at the scene saw bodies being carried away and houses submerged in two areas of the city, where roads were turned into churning rivers of mud and corpses washed up on the streets.

Mohamed Sinneh, a morgue technician at Freetown’s Connaught Hospital, said “at least” 180 bodies had been received so far, many of them children, leaving no space to lay the dead because of the “overwhelming” number of corpses at the facility. More bodies were taken to private morgues, Sinneh said.

Disaster management official Candy Rogers said “over 2,000 people are homeless”, hinting at the huge humanitarian effort that will be required to deal with the fallout of the flooding in one of Africa’s poorest nations.

Images obtained by AFP showed a ferocious churning of mud coursing down a steep street, while videos posted by local residents showed people waist and chest deep in water trying to traverse the road.

Other images showed battered corpses piled on top of each other, as residents struggled to cope with the destruction. Local media reports also said that a section of a hill in the Regent area of the city had partially collapsed.

Freetown, an overcrowded coastal city of 1.2-million, is hit annually by flooding during several months of rain that destroys makeshift settlements and raises the risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera.