A LANDSLIDE has hit eastern Uganda, killing at least 80 people and leaving hundreds missing, the country’s Red Cross has said.
The overnight landslide buried homes in three villages in the mountainous district of Bududa, where torrential rain has been falling for several weeks.
According to Catherine Ntabadde, a spokesperson for the Ugandan Red Cross, 350 people are still missing after houses built on mountain slopes were swept away by the mud.
“We are still looking for another 350 bodies that were buried under debris in three villages and are being assisted by the engineering department of the Ugandan army, who have brought heavy lifting equipment to remove debris.”
Locals are also digging through the mud with hand-held tools, looking for survivors and bodies. Yesterday morning, two elderly women were found alive.
The Red Cross is now distributing blankets and jerrycans to the surrounding area, said Ms Ntabadde.
However, the death toll could be as high as 200 already, said district commissioner Wanjusi Wasiebathe Bududa, who warned that further landslides are likely as more heavy rain is forecast for the area, which is 170km northeast of the capital Kampala.
“We are burying all the dead tomorrow and moving people to higher ground,” he said, on the phone from the area. He attributed the disaster to the cutting down of trees on hill tops, which accelerated the rate of soil erosion brought on by the heavy rains.
Uganda’s ministry of disaster preparedness has now asked people living on mountain slopes to leave their areas. People living in low-lying flood-prone areas have also been asked to move. Bududa is home to about 150,000 people.
The region often suffers from landslides, but the rising death toll would make this one of the worse disasters in recent memory. During the El Niño rains of 1997, landslides killed 48 people.
Experts have warned for several years that climate change is altering rainfall pattern in eastern Africa, from regular and moderate to more unexpected and extreme.
According to one study last year by researchers from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, there has been an increase in the number of reported “hydrometeorological disasters” in east Africa, from an average of less than three events a year in the 1980s to more than seven in the 1990s.
This has risen between 2000 and 2006 to 10 events, with the number of floods increasing.
The Kenyan meteorological service has warned that parts of western Kenya, such as the Rift Valley which borders Uganda, may experience abnormally heavy rains that could sweep away roads.
