Forty-six people are missing and seven others died in southern Ecuador, in a landslide caused by heavy rains overnight from Sunday to Monday, according to an official report.
Several dozen houses were buried in the locality of Alausi, in the province of Chimborazo, about 300 km south of Quito, in an Andean area hit last week by an earthquake that killed 15 people, including one in neighboring Peru.
The landslide left 46 people missing, seven dead and 23 injured, Ecuadorian authorities said Monday in a new report. A first official report reported 16 dead and seven missing. Nearly 500 people in total were affected by the flow, on a neighborhood clinging to the mountain in the northeastern outskirts of the city.
Little hope of finding survivors
Images broadcast by local media showed dozens of rescuers and civilians bustling around the debris to try to free buried people, in a ballet of ambulances with flashing lights and screaming sirens.
A massive brownish mudslide suddenly descended from the verdant mountains that surround Alausi, home to some 45,000 people. In the disaster area, survivors in tears and with tearful faces waited for news of their missing loved ones.
“The government is totally active, focused on the Alausi tragedy,” Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso reacted on Twitter, assuring that firefighters had been on the job since the early hours of the morning “to come to the aid to affected citizens.
“Devil’s Nose”
The area where the tragedy occurred had been on “yellow alert” since February for the risk of landslides, due to severe weather affecting the region in recent weeks. The authorities had also warned of a possible collapse of the E35 road in the Casual sector, where part of the mountain had broken away.
The city of Alausi is known worldwide for the “Devil’s Nose”, a steep slope through which Ecuador’s Trans-Andean railway line passes, a stretch dubbed the “most difficult train in the world” due to its dangerousness.
Since January, heavy rains have already left 22 dead and 346 homeless in the country. More than 6,900 houses were damaged and 72 were destroyed, authorities said. Some 987 incidents were caused by bad weather, such as floods and landslides. In February, rains led to a five-day suspension of crude oil pumping as a pipeline threatened to burst after a bridge collapsed.