By Ken Afor
At least 23 people have been killed in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, by a landslide brought on by heavy rain, firefighters said on Monday as they looked for more victims.
In Yaounde, where homes are occasionally perilously constructed on the city’s numerous hills, landslides occur frequently during the rainy season.
The most recent incident happened on Sunday night in the nearly three million-person district of Mbankolo, northwest of Yaounde.
According to public broadcaster CRTV, torrential rain caused a dam holding back an artificial lake perched on higher ground to collapse.
“Yesterday we pulled out 15 people who had died and this morning we have found eight,” the fire service’s second in command David Petatoa Poufong told reporters at the site.
“We are still looking.”
An AFP journalist saw distraught relatives watch as firefighters drove away some of the victims’ covered-in-sheets bodies.
In order to keep onlookers and media away from the area where the landslide occurred, a security cordon was emplaced.
Images shown on television, however, revealed a whole section of a hill had collapsed, along with what remained of what appeared to be houses made of wood, dried earth bricks, and metal sheeting.
“There was a landslide after heavy rain. The water swept away everything in its path,” Daouda Ousmanou, a local administrative official announced on public radio.
According to CRTV, the mudslide destroyed about 30 homes and images from what appeared to be the night showed torrents of water and mud still flowing in some areas.
At least 15 people perished in a landslide that buried funeral party attendees in Yaounde’s working-class Damas neighborhood in November of last year.
In 2019, a landslide that was caused by a dozen flimsy homes built on the side of a hill killed 43 people in the western city of Bafoussam.
