The death toll from landslides that hit south-western Ethiopia on Sunday and Monday has risen to 257 and could reach 500, the UN’s office for humanitarian affairs (OCHA) says.
Heavy rains in the mountainous Gofa zone caused a landslide on Sunday night, followed by a second on Monday morning that trapped people who were rescuing victims of the first.
The death toll stood at 229 on Tuesday, according to Ethiopia’s national disaster risk management commission.
At least 125 people have been displaced and 12 injured, OCHA said in an update on Thursday. More than 15,000 affected people need to be evacuated immediately because of the risk of more landslides, it said.
Search and rescue operations are continuing. Images the Gofa authorities posted on Facebook showed people digging through the mud with their bare hands.
One survivor, Tseganesh Obole, told Agence France-Presse that mud had swept down a hill and engulfed her and her six children. “I was swallowed by a mudslide along with many people, including my children,” she said as her remaining family stood in shock nearby.
Her brother Dawit clawed through the mud to get her out, but “four of my children died and remained buried”, she said. Her husband is still missing, also presumed buried in the mud.
Obole’s family are among the thousands of people affected by the deadliest landslide so far recorded in Ethiopia, which is highly vulnerable to climate-related disasters.
Dawit, who had himself been pulled from the mud, said he returned to dig out his sister. “When I went there the second time, only two of her children survived,” he told AFP.
Gofa is a remote area in the South Ethiopia regional state. The disaster came after heavy seasonal rains between April and May that caused flooding, damaged infrastructure and displaced more than 1,000 people.
The UN chief, António Guterres, sent his condolences over the disaster, with his spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric saying he was “deeply saddened”.
“The United Nations and its partners are working closely with the government, evaluating the humanitarian situation to determine the extent of the damage and assess the humanitarian needs of the affected population,” Dujarric said. “UN agencies are dispatching food, nutrition, health and other critical supplies to help people affected by the landslides.”
Senait Solomon, head of communications for the South Ethiopia regional government, told AFP on Wednesday that the landslide site was sloped and “prone to disasters”, adding that conservation work to protect the area, including tree planting, had been under way at the time of the landslides.
Ethiopia is highly vulnerable to drought, flooding and other climate disasters. A landslide in 2016 killed 41 people after torrential rain in Wolaita, in southern Ethiopia, and unusually heavy rainfall in the south and east of the country last November killed dozens of people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
In 2017, at least 113 people died when a mountain of garbage collapsed in a dump in the outskirts of Addis Ababa.
The deadliest landslide in Africa was in Sierra Leone’s capital in Freetown in August 2017, when 1,141 people were killed. Mudslides in the Mount Elgon region of eastern Uganda killed more than 350 people in February 2010.
