Death toll climbing

MUDSLIDES: COLOMBIAN TOWN HAD LITTLE WARNING

Rescuers are still searching for survivors; Pope is praying for victims.

Devastating mudslides in the Colombian town of Mocoa killed at least 254 people, 43 of them children, President Juan Manuel Santos said, with the death toll expected to rise significantly.

Santos, who travelled to the southern town to personally oversee relief operations, warned the toll could keep climbing.

“Unfortunately, these are still preliminary figures,” he wrote on Twitter.

“We offer our prayers for all of them. We send our condolences and the entire country’s sympathies to their families.”

Survivors described gruesome scenes in the remote southern town, as rescuers kept up a bleak search for victims in the muck and debris.

Covered in mud, 38-year-old Marta Gomez told of going to search for her missing niece – and making a chilling find instead.

“I went to look for my niece, but I couldn’t find her. I dug and dug and found what turned out to be a baby’s hand. It was horrible,” she said in a shelter set up for the newly homeless.

As she stood in line waiting to register for government assistance for those who lost their houses, she told she had given up on finding her niece.

“The mud took her away. I’ll never see her again,” she said, clinging to the leash of her equally muddy German shepherd.

Rescuers worked in stifling heat under a cloudy sky in the remote Amazon town, the capital of the Putumayo district.

The debris left by the mudslides was everywhere: buried cars, uprooted trees, children’s toys and stray shoes sticking up out of the mud.

The torrent of mud, boulders and debris struck the town with little warning late on Friday after days of heavy rains that caused three area rivers to flood.

It swept away homes, bridges, vehicles and trees, leaving piles of wrecked timber.

Most of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods in the town of 40 000 are poor and populated with people uprooted during Colombia’s five-decade-long civil war.

A “profoundly saddened” Pope Francis said he was praying for the victims. –

Picture: AFP BLEAK. A child sits next to a motorcycle destroyed by the mudslides in Mocoa, southern Colombia. The death toll from a devastating landslide stood at about 250 yesterday.