Floods wash away entire villages, aid agencies scramble to reach victims

Heavy floods have hit a string of villages in southern Sierra Leone, wiping away scores of houses, trapping villagers and leaving vast areas inaccessible to humanitarian teams scrambling to assess the damage, aid officials said on Friday.

Two rivers in the Pujehun district, around 300 km south-east of the capital Freetown, burst their banks after heavy rains last weekend, according to officials with the Sierra Leone Red Cross.

“People left their food and all their belongings and had to move for their lives,” Gassimu Mallah, an official with the Sierra Leone Red Cross who visited the area this week, told IRIN on Friday.

Mallah said villagers had told him that this was the worst flooding they had seen since 1945.

Entire villages had been swallowed up, Mallah said. The population of Titonko was trapped as the floodwater had completely surrounded the village.

Preliminary estimates from an UN inter-agency mission showed about 3,000 people living in 19 villages affected by the flooding.

Reuters news agency quoted a government official as saying the floods had killed at least 20 people, but this could not be independently confirmed.

UN and Red Cross officials told IRIN said they did not yet know the number of total number of deaths. A Red Cross worker said only one death had been confirmed as of Friday.

Senior Humanitarian Affairs Officer with the UN, Erasmus Ibom, said it was difficult to know for sure how many people had been killed or affected because the rains had washed out roads, cutting off several villages.

The UN had planned to send a helicopter to do an aerial assessment on Friday but the mission had to be postponed because of bad weather, Ibom said.

The World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organisation and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) are meeting to coordinate assistance efforts. They plan to distribute food and other basic supplies, Ibom said.

Meanwhile the Sierra Leone Red Cross is concerned that its limited supplies will run out before it can help flood victims whose homes and belongings have been destroyed.

“That is our worry,” Solomon Conteh who is based in the Red Cross office in Freetown said, adding that an appeal would soon be launched. “We will urgently need mats, tarpaulins, blankets, kitchen sets and other basic supplies.”

Cholera is also a serious concern because many wells have been completely wiped out in villages which do not have access to healthcare even in the dry season.