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| Heavy rains caused a wall of mud to destroy homes and bury people alive at Freetown, Sierra Leone.
At least 312 people were killed and more than 2,000 left homeless on
Monday when heavy flooding hit Sierra Leone's capital of Freetown, leaving
excavators to pull bodies from rubble and overwhelming the city's morgues.
Journalist saw several homes submerged in Regent village, a hilltop
community, and corpses floating in the water in the Lumley West area of the
city, as the president assured emergency services were doing all they could to
tackle one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the city.
Red Cross spokesman Patrick Massaquoi said that the death toll was 312
but could rise further as his team continued to survey disaster areas in
Freetown and tally the number of dead.
Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world, according to
UN indicators.
"I counted over 300 bodies and more are coming," Mohamed
Sinneh, a morgue technician at Freetown's Connaught Hospital, said, having
earlier described an "overwhelming number of dead" at the facility
leaving no space to lay out every body.
Many more of the dead were taken to private morgues, Sinneh said.
President Ernest Bai Koroma said in an address to the nation broadcast
on television late Monday that an emergency response centre had been
established at Regent, the worst-affected area.
He appealed for unity from a nation still struggling with the legacy of
Ebola and a long civil war.
"Our nation has once again been gripped by grief. Many of our
compatriots have lost their lives, many more have been gravely injured and
billions of Leones' worth of property destroyed in the flooding and landslides
that swept across some parts of our city," he said.
"Every single family, every single ethnic group, every single
region is either directly or indirectly affected by this disaster," Koroma
said.
He announced that centres would be set up across the city to register
those made homeless and praised the military, police and Red Cross volunteers,
deployed in an all-out effort to locate those trapped.
- No warning -
Images showed ferocious, churning dark-orange mud coursing down a steep
street in the capital, while videos posted by local residents showed people
waist or chest-deep in water trying to cross the road.
The Sierra Leone meteorological department did not issue any warning
ahead of the torrential rains to hasten evacuation from the disaster zones.
Fatmata Sesay, who lives on the hilltop area of Juba, said she, her
three children and husband were awoken at 4:30 am by rain pounding on the mud
house they occupy, which was by then submerged by water.
"I only managed to escape by climbing to the roof of the house when
neighbours came in to rescue me," she said.
"We have lost everything and we do not have a place to sleep,"
she said in tears.
Deputy Information Minister Cornelius Deveaux earlier confirmed Koroma
had called a national emergency, and said his own boss, Information Minister
Mohamed Bangura, was in hospital after being injured in the flooding.
Deveaux said "hundreds" of people had lost their lives and had
properties damaged, and promised food and other assistance for the victims.
He called on the public to remain calm with rescue efforts underway.
The scale of the human cost of the floods only became clear on Monday
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.
Meanwhile disaster management official Vandy Rogers said that "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.
Freetown, an overcrowded coastal city of 1.2 million, is hit each year
by flooding during several months of rain that destroys makeshift settlements
and raises the risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera.
- Rainy season not over -
Sasha Ekanayake, Save the Children's Sierra Leone Country Director, said
the immediate priority was to provide shelter and protect residents, especially
children, from the spread of deadly waterborne diseases.
"We are still in the rainy season and must be prepared to respond
in the event of further emergencies to come," she said in a statement.
Flooding in the capital in 2015 killed 10 people and left thousands
homeless.
Sierra Leone was one of the West African nations hit by an outbreak of
the Ebola virus in 2014 that left more than 4,000 people dead in the country,
and it has struggled to revive its economy since the crisis.
About 60 percent of people in Sierra Leone live below the national
poverty line, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The country ranked 179th out of 188 countries
on the UNDP's 2016 Human Development Index, a basket of data combining life
expectancy, education and income and other factors.
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