‘It could have been me’: S.Leone struggles to recover from disaster

As of Sunday, 499 people had been buried, 156 of whom were children, technician Mohamed Sinneh Kamara said at Freetown’s central morgue. The Red Cross did not immediately respond to a request from AFP to confirm the figure.

On Saturday, the official toll was 441, but emergency teams expected it to rise, given that several hundred people are unaccounted for.

Thomas Benson, an electrical engineer, said he used his hands to extract the bodies of his sister and niece, two of nine family members he lost in the early hours of Monday.

All that is left of his five-bedroom home, which had a grocery shop on the ground floor, are the iron sheets used for the roof.

But after seeing the piles of corpses at the Freetown morgue, he volunteered to help the burial team pack body bags.

Nearly a week later, “I’m still in shock for what has happened to my family,” he told AFP.

– Aid trickles in –

Those who escaped have been told to evacuate the disaster zone, as the government worries about potential outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases as the water stagnates.

But that has left residents packing into makeshift shelters or with neighbours in the overcrowded capital of 1.2 million people, and the government has not yet said how it intends to relocate them.

Flooding is an annual menace in Sierra Leone, where rickety homes are regularly swept away by seasonal rains. In 2015, floods killed 10 people and left thousands homeless.

The Red Cross has issued an emergency funding appeal. Britain, the former colonial power in Sierra Leone, has pledged £5 million ($6.5 million, 5.5 million euros), while China has pledged $1 million (850,000 euros) and Togo $500,000.

International aide is starting to trickle in: A plane from Ghana arrived on Sunday to supply blankets, mattresses and clothing, followed by a plane from Morocco.