Afghanistan Mudslide
Afghanistan Mudslide
Afghanistan Mudslide 2014, many dead from the disaster
Just a few days ago, after another natural disaster, this time in Afghanistan, hundreds of people lost their lives after getting buried alive by a catastrophic mudslide in a remote northern corner of Afghanistan. Last Friday, a mudslide literally rolled through the village that was located there and with a second collapse even trapped all the neighboring places from where people actually had gone out to help the people from the village. Officials reported that tons of soil and rocks just broke off from a hill in Badakhshan district which is located near the Tajik border resulting in a massive wave of mud that just left a path of destruction once it stopped moving.
Reports also state that out of the at least one thousand houses in Aab Barik, almost three hundred were below mud after the mudslide and even though about six hundred people went to help, the hill then collapsed a second time from what provincial governor Shah Waliullah Adib said to news reporters.
The provincial governor visited several of the sites the mudslide went through himself along with the authorities and the provincial chief and after inspecting the sites of the wreckage and talking with the villagers who were there, reported that about two thousand and five hundred people were trapped. The governor later stated that the amount of damage that was done to the village by the mudslide was so severe that any hopes of digging out survivors were gone.
The village of Badakhshan is sadly quite isolated and poor and even though the mudslide didn’t hit too far from the provincial capital, it managed to hit an area with patchy communication links and a quite measurable insurgent presence. From what the governor has said and if the calculations are correct about the death count then this particular disaster is considered to be the country’s most deadly natural disaster since 1998 when two earthquakes killed about seven hundred people.
Mohammad Zakria Sauda, member of the parliament from the province, stated that there were more than a dozen thousand people dead and a large part of those that got buried by the mudslide was also rescuers that were caught by surprise in the second landslide.
Barack Obama, president of the U.S. sent a message of condolence as well on behalf of his country saying the following, “On behalf of the American people, our thoughts are with the people of Afghanistan, who have experienced an awful tragedy.”
Even though the Afghans that live in the northern part of the country are used to residing in the rugged mountains that are full of avalanches and mudslides, they had never before seen something as deadly as last Friday’s mudslide. Most people were buried in their cars or houses while they were trying to make it out of the disastrous mudslide.
Needless to say, the disaster has shook all of Afghanistan and people that survived the mudslide are already taking precautions against future natural disasters that might occur in the area since it is now feared that the mountains on the northern part of Afghanistan may be holding even more disasters for the future.
