Pentagon is within Kamayama, a settlement in the west-end of Freetown accommodating dozens of communities identified by the government as the hardest hit by last Monday’s mudslide, which claimed over 400 lives, including children and destroyed properties worth millions of dollars.
Amidst the trauma of losing loved ones, survivors and relatives of the victims of the tragedy are also struggling to cope with the brutal aftermath, for many like Ann-Marie Kargbo who told this medium that food and shelter were their immediate concerns.
Ann-Marie lost her entire family, including her husband and five children.
She only survived because she did not spend the night at home on that fateful day when a vast portion part of mount sugar loaf collapsed killing over four hundred people with six hundred still unaccounted for .
Ann-Marie was only survived because she went on a night vigil, when the tragedy struck her community killing her whole family.
‘I was shocked and devastated when I realized that mudslide had killed my entire family and I became unconscious before I was admitted at Connaught hospital for medication. I am homeless and struggling hard to pick up the pieces,’ Anne Marie lamented.
Ann Maria is six months old pregnant and she is yet to identify the remains of her husband and three children despite several nerve-racking visits to the Connaught hospital mortuary in Freetown where dismembered bodies were temporarily kept for burial at Waterloo in the western rural district.
Some of the tales survivors and relatives of the victims told the APA were harrowing and apocalyptic in nature.
They spoke of a sudden explosion at the top of mount sugar loaf on that fateful morning and experienced terrifying gush of boulders and reddish water washing houses properties and human beings
Regent and Kaningo and Kamayama were completely destroyed leaving a vast field of thick mud.
The most heart-rending story was that worshipers with an orphanage housing good number of children all perished in disaster.
Government officials have pronounced that some of the victims buried under the rubble may never be recovered.
Survivors and humanitarian workers are resuming an imminent possibility of the outbreak of waterborne diseases and called on the relevant authorities to put concrete remedial measures in place for any possible outbreak.
Sierra Leone has an unusual weather pattern with nine months of torrential rain, which intensifies between August and September every year.
During these periods, Freetown and its environs would always experience torrential rains and it would some cases wreck havoc on slum and other communities pruned to national disaster.