229 killed in rain-caused mudslides in south-western Ethiopia

At least 229 people have been reported dead in landslides caused by heavy rain in south-western Ethiopia, BBC reported.

On Tuesday, leaders of the Kencho Shacha Gozdi district stated that there might be more deaths as people started using shovels and their own hands to dig through the debris to look for the victims.

The majority of those who perished in the disaster were part of a rescue mission searching for bodies from an earlier mudslide that occurred the previous day.

Many people are still unaccounted for says Markos Melese, the director of the disaster response agency in Gofa Zone. “There are children who are hugging corpses, having lost their entire family, including mother, father, brother and sister, due to the accident,” he told the Associated Press.

Some of the snapshots show people standing on the red ground some of whom are using their bare hands to search for survivors in the red ground as posted on the Facebook account of the Gofa Zone authority.

Gofa Zone is one of the zones of the South Ethiopia regional state which has significant areas of mountains. Heavy rains that occurred between April and May led to flood incidents which destroyed infrastructures and affected more than a thousand people based on the report of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In another place called Wolaita in the southern part of Ethiopia, 41 people died in a mudslide that occurred after a heavy rainfall in 2016. Over the last few decades, Ethiopia and other East African countries have been more vulnerable to climate change, the alteration of seasonality and the length of the dry and rainy seasons.

In November last year, southern and eastern Ethiopia received three times its normal rainfall, which caused 100s of deaths and displacement of 1000s of people.