Sierra Leone braced for more floods as the country buries the casualties of a mudslide that killed hundreds of people in the capital, Freetown. A mudslide happened on Monday after a mountainside collapsed in Regent in the southeast of Freetown following torrential rains and took the lives of around 300 people. Heavy rains were reported on Tuesday and Wednesday.
More than 600 people remain missing and search operations are hampered by the continuous rain, Bloomberg reported.
Further landslides are possible and the government may have to evacuate some areas, the United Nations humanitarian aid coordination agency said in a statement on Thursday.
Sam Gibson, the mayor of Freetown, has called on the public to steer clear of dangerous locations and flood-prone areas.
August is the peak of the rainy season in Sierra Leone. The disaster came less than two years after the end of an Ebola epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa, with Sierra Leone one of the hardest-hit countries.
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