Two landslides kill 229 people in Ethiopia

JOHANNESBURG — At least 229 people were killed in southwestern Ethiopia on Monday after a landslide flattened several houses in a village following days of heavy rain, and neighbors who rushed to dig out those buried under the mud were hit with a second landslide about an hour later.

The first landslide struck the village in the Geze district between 8:30 and 9 a.m. Monday, said Habtamu Fetena, who heads the local government’s emergency response. Nearly 300 people from two neighboring villages ran to the area to help and began digging through the mud by hand, he said Tuesday.

Then about an hour later, without warning, more mud slid down the hillside above the village, and killed many of those trying to help.

“They had no clue that the land they were standing on was about to swallow them,” Fetena said.

The village hit by the landslides lies in a region that is increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including long droughts followed by strong storms and more frequent and intense rainfalls, experts said. Deadly landslides have struck the region before, another local administrator, Dagmawi Ayele, told the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corp. While some villages were moved after earlier landslides, such disasters were now occurring in areas where they had previously been rare, he added.

The first landslide killed entire families as mud rolled down the hillside, officials said. Teachers and health care workers were among those killed in the second landslide. Among them was the local administrative leader, who had rushed to the scene. Most of those killed were men, but pregnant women and children were also among the dead, Fetena said.

The death toll was expected to rise as more victims were pulled from the mud. As of Tuesday afternoon, just 10 people had been pulled alive from the landslide, officials said. Fetena said only about 20 people had managed to flee to safety in the second landslide.

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