Families dig for bodies after mudslides and flooding kill 300 in Sierra Leone’s capital
MORE than 300 people have been killed after a mudslide and heavy flooding in Sierra Leone.
Relatives were left digging through mud in search of their loved ones and a mortuary in the capital of Freetown was overwhelmed with bodies.
Houses were submerged in mud after a night of heavy rain that saw a hillside in the Regent area collapse, with roads described by witnesses as being turned into “churning rivers of mud”.
Adama Kamara wept as she described failing to rescue her sevenweek-old child. “We were inside when we heard the mudslide approaching. I attempted to grab my baby but the mud was too fast. She was covered alive,” said Kamara. She was not sure what had happened to her husband.
A man said he had left early in the morning to buy bread. When he returned, his wife, children, siblings and in-laws were all dead.
Speaking at the scene, Sierra Leone’s vice president Victor Foh said: “It is likely that hundreds are lying dead underneath the rubble.”
He added: “The disaster is so serious that I myself feel broken. We’re trying to cordon [off ] the area [and] evacuate the people.”
People cried as they looked at the damage under steady rain, gesturing towards a muddy hillside where dozens of houses used to stand.
Sinneh Kamara, a coroner technician at the Connaught hospital, told local media that the number killed had overwhelmed the facility.
“The capacity at the mortuary is too small for the corpses,” he told the National Broadcasting Corporation.
Sierra Leone’s national television broadcaster interrupted its regular programming to show scenes of people trying to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Others were seen carrying relatives’ remains in rice sacks to the mortuary. Military personnel have been deployed to help in the rescue operation in the West African country.
Fatmata Sesay, who lives on the hilltop area of Juba, said she, her three children and husband were woken at 4.30am by rain beating down on their mud house, which was by then submerged by water. She managed to escape by climbing onto the roof.
“We have lost everything and we do not have a place to sleep,” she said.
The scale of the human cost of the floods was only becoming clear yesterday afternoon, as images of battered corpses piled on top of each other circulated and residents spoke of their struggles to cope with the destruction and find their loved ones.
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. Many of the impoverished areas are close to sea level and have poor drainage systems, exacerbating flooding.
Flooding in the capital in 2015 killed 10 people and left thousands homeless.