By Eromo Egbejule
FREETOWN, Nov 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Augustine Deen, a 31-year-old officer with the Sierra Leone Police Force, was on night duty at his post in Freetown, counting down the hours, when disaster struck.
In the early morning of Aug. 14, a major mudslide hit Mount Sugarloaf, which overlooks the capital city, slicing it in two.
The collapse killed 400 people, with hundreds more still missing, and left an estimated 3,000 homeless.
Corpses floated in the flood waters, while some families were forced to dig for the bodies of their loved ones under the rubble. Deen’s wife and six children back home in the Pentagon New Site slum on the mountain slopes survived, but his four brothers, sister-in-law and his nephew were killed.
Home to a little over 1 million people according to a 2015 census, Freetown’s population swelled at the turn of the century as citizens in rural areas fled a decade-long civil war that ended in 2002.
The city was originally designed to house only around 300,000 people, and is now struggling to meet basic needs for housing, electricity, sewage and water, said Jamie Hitchen, a policy researcher at the London-based Africa Research Institute.
Homes are being built in areas identified as “at risk”, and despite the creation of an EU-funded Freetown Development Plan in 2014, city planning has been given little priority, he added.
“So far the government’s response to annual floods has been superficial and short-term,” Hitchen told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Urban management problems are one of the major causes, along with deforestation and climate change.”
Freetown, initially designed by colonial-era British administrators, has been plagued by heavy rains and flooding yearly since 2008.
Its many slums and informal settlements are built high on mountain slopes, leaving tens of thousands of inhabitants vulnerable to death and displacement when the rains come.
Builders have encroached into protected forest areas on the hills behind the city, causing soil erosion – a phenomenon that contributed to the August landslide.
Officials at Freetown City Council said there are laws to prevent illegal construction, but these are often flouted or permits obtained through bribery.
In 2014, the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre carried out an environmental assessment to map areas at risk of flooding, but the government did not act on it.
“Over the years, many people were displaced by crisis including the… civil war, so many people escaped to the city and built houses in areas where they shouldn’t,” said Cornelius Deveaux, deputy minister of information.
