More than 100 people have been buried alive in two horrific landslides in southern Ethiopia as a result of torrential rains, government officials stated, and they said that the death toll could rise.
The first landslide occurred on Monday in the Gofa zone and hit an area not easily accessible, while the second landslide buried the rescuers after they had flocked in to help the first group of victims, the state establishment said on Tuesday.
The head of the national disaster response agency in Gofa, Markos Melese, told Reuters that two villages have been searched and more than 157 people have been found dead, with more expected to be pulled out of the debris. ”There are bodies that are yet to be recovered,” he said.
The initial casualty figures differed across agencies; the AFP listed the death toll at 146 or more, while the Associated Press (AP) at one point raised the figure to 157 from 55.
District administrator Misikir Mitiku said, “Initially, it was three families that were buried by the landslide. We are still searching for bodies. But the death toll surged after the people who came to rescue also got trapped.”
Pictures posted on social media networks showed people using their hands to dig through heaps of red-coloured soil.
Slightly covering an area of 320 kilometres southwest of Addis Ababa, Gofa is in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR), which tends to be severely affected by the seasonal rainfall, which normally results in flooding and, catastrophically, landslides.
Kemal Hashi Mohamoud, a parliamentarian from Addis Ababa, told Reuters that the second one was a few minutes after the first one. “People are preparing shelter and giving them food,” he said.
A local administrator, Dagmawi Ayele, told AP, that some of the victims were children and pregnant women.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in a statement early this May, stated that heavy rains between April and May had already caused floods and displaced thousands of people.
As quoted by Al Jazeera, it said in May that “floods impacted over 19,000 people in several zones, displacing over a thousand and causing damage to livelihoods and infrastructure.”
Other parts of Ethiopia, like the southern region, for instance, have not been exempted from such sad incidences; it is for record that at least 32 lives were reported lost in a week in landslides in 2018.
The UN has drawn attention to a potentially worsening humanitarian crisis with a consistently high risk of malnutrition caused by climate change.
