At least 15 people were confirmed dead on Thursday, and more than 100 others are missing after heavy rains triggered six villages in eastern Uganda on Wednesday, according to converging news reports.
Local media images show vast areas of earth that have slid down hillsides, covering the village of Masugu, which is about a five-hour drive from the capital, Kampala. Social media videos and photos showed people digging through the rubble searching for survivors in another village called Kimono.
The Uganda Red Cross Society said that rescue efforts are ongoing but warned that the death toll is expected to rise.
“We’ve lost about 30 people,” Faheera Mpalanyi, the District Commissioner for Bulambuli, told AFP. “So far, we have recovered six bodies, including that of a baby.”
Due to the scale of the affected area, it is likely ” many more people are missing and likely buried under the debris,” she added.
In addition to the landslides, heavy rain has caused widespread flooding in the northwest, after a tributary of the Nile River overflowed. The Prime Minister’s office issued a disaster alert on Wednesday, warning that major roads across the country had been cut off.
Emergency teams have been deployed to rescue stranded motorists, and a road connecting Uganda to South Sudan was impassable as of Wednesday evening.
Emergency boat crews were sent to the area near the town of Pakwach, a West Nile region, where one boat capsized, resulting in the death of an engineer, Uganda’s defense forces wrote on X (formerly Twitter).