ADDIS ABABA: Local residents were desperately searching for survivors on Tuesday after a landslide in a remote area of southern Ethiopia killed 229 people, the deadliest such disaster recorded in the Horn of Africa nation.
Crowds of people were gathered at the site of the tragedy, some clawing through the mud with shovels or their bare hands, according to images posted on social media by the local authority.
The government-owned Ethiopia Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) said 229 people had died in the landslide in the Geze-Gofa district in an isolated mountainous region in the South Ethiopia regional state.
Five people had been pulled alive from the mud and were receiving treatment at medical facilities, the EBC reported more than 24 hours after the disaster struck on Monday morning.
The broadcaster quoted local administrator Dagemawi Ayele as saying that most of the victims were buried after they went to help the inhabitants of a house hit by an initial landslide.
“Those who rushed for live-saving work have perished in the disaster including the locality’s administrator, teachers, health professionals and agricultural professionals,” EBC quoted Dagemawi as saying.
Earlier, the Gofa zone Communications Affairs Department, quoting local official Habtamu Fetena, said 146 people had lost their lives.
Habtamu said the bodies of 96 men and 50 women had been found, adding that the search was “continuing vigorously” and warning that the number of dead could increase.
Images posted on social media by the Gofa authority showed residents carrying bodies of the dead on makeshift stretchers, some wrapped in plastic sheeting.
Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa with around 120 million people, is highly vulnerable to climate disasters including flooding and drought.
‘Stand in solidarity’
African Union Commission chief Moussa Faki Mahamat said “our hearts and prayers” were with the families of the victims.
“We stand in strong solidarity with the people and Government of Ethiopia as rescue efforts continue to find the missing and assist the displaced,” he said on X.
Gofa is roughly 450 kilometres (270 miles) from the capital Addis Ababa, a drive of about 10 hours, and is located north of the Maze National Park.
“The area of the disaster is rural, remote and very mountainous,” an Ethiopian refugee living in Kenya who said he is from a district neighbouring Geze-Gofa told AFP.
“The soil in that area isn’t strong, so when heavy rains and landslides happen the soil immediately runs down to the ground below.”
The South Ethiopia regional state has been battered by the short seasonal rains between April and early May that have caused flooding and mass displacement, according to the UN’s humanitarian response agency OCHA.
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”.
In 2016, 41 people were killed in a landslide following heavy rains in Wolaita, also in South Ethiopia.
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 perished.
Mudslides in the Mount Elgon region of eastern Uganda killed more than 350 people in February 2010.
