BUDUDA, Uganda — Rescue workers equipped only with hand-held tools gave up their search Tuesday and waited for bulldozers to arrive to help find about 100 people who residents said were missing after landslides struck Uganda’s mountainous east.
Residents who survived the natural disaster stared at the quickly hardening red sludge the day after landslides hit the eastern district of Bududa. A government official called the region a “deathtrap” and said the government would move people out.
Government officials have not released a death toll, but the Uganda Red Cross said it has confirmed 18 deaths. But some villagers in a place called Bunamulembwa, one of the villages swept by landslides in Bududa, said close to 100 people - mostly children - were missing.
“It is feared the landslides and floods buried about 29 homes with about 30 people,” Stephen Mallinga, Uganda’s minister for relief and disaster preparedness, said in a statement Tuesday. “We cannot as of now establish the exact number of homes and people buried.”
Workers and volunteers who dug at the mud with machetes and hoes said the job was frustrating.
“The mud is just too deep,” said Hannington Serugga, a rescue worker with an aid group called Samaritan Emergency Volunteers’ Organization.
“We have tried our level best [to retrieve bodies] and we have failed. This really is a challenge.”
Michael Solo, a man who said he lost his four children in the landslides, pointed to the spot where he suspected they were buried.
He said his house was one of 17 buried in the neighborhood.
“I used to love this place,” Solo said. “But now I want to go. I just want to go.”
Villager Alice Bunyolo said her brother had lost his wife and two children.
“My brother, I feel bad for my brother,” she said.
Another man who said he lost his entire family wept as he gazed to the sky, offering his dirty handkerchief and praying for a miracle.
Landslides have struck the area in eastern Uganda at least once each year since March 2010, when rain-dislodged earth killed about 100 people and destroyed everything from a church to the village market.
Officials say the threat from landslides is not over and that 400,000 people living on the edges of Uganda’s Mount Elgon are likely to be displaced by torrential rains. For years the government has failed to persuade villagers to move to safer places; local activists say it would be a cultural disaster if the people left their ancestral homes.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 06/27/2012