On Monday a heavy burst of rainfall dislodged tonnes of earth on a spur of Sugarloaf mountain. The mudslide crashed through hundreds of illegally-constructed shanties in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Freetown, Sierra Leone's first city. More than 400 people's bodies have since been pulled from the earth, including those of 109 children.
More than 600 are still missing.
Sierra Leone's army has been deployed in a search-and-rescue capacity although the grim truth is that no survivors have been found since Wednesday. Rescue efforts have been hampered all week by the
spectre of further flooding as rain has continued to fall across the coast. Emergency workers now face a race against the clock to prevent further loss of life due to disease and contaminated water supplies.
The city's largest morgue is already over-full and mass burials continue around the clock. The threat of disease is very real for this community which saw 4,000 people die in the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak.
No less deadly were the monsoonal floods that ravaged South Asia this week. At last count 245 people had perished and
almost 1.5m had been displaced. Nepal's low-lying southern regions have been completely inundated; more than 100 people have died there alone. Distressing images depict entire farming communities that are barely visible above the raging waterline.
The tremendous mass of water is still finding its way back to the sea as it bulges and breaks riverbanks throughout India and Bangladesh. In Bihar, one of India's least-developed states, the flood-tide was high enough to break the famous Kosi embankment. For days incessant rainfall had unleashed torrents down the river, weakening and degrading the embankments. Engineers had worked valiantly to reinforce and raise its most vulnerable sections, but in the end the river had its way.
One of the most important and volatile tributaries of the Ganges, the Kosi river has broken its banks and
changed course many times over the last century. The ever-present threat of destruction eased somewhat in the 1950s following the construction of Kosi's famous 100km-long embankment. But this past week bought back dark memories of devastating floods in 2008 that killed more than 400 and displaced 2.3 million people.
The flood waters are making one last stop before they reach the ocean - in the low-lying swamps and marshes of Bangladesh where right now one third of the entire country is flooded.
The human toll of these floods has been dreadful. But to make matters worse a rare animal reserve has also been largely destroyed. Nepal's Chitwan National Park is one of the last protected habitats of the Bengal Tiger and the One-horned Rhinoceros. It's believed that several rhinos were swept away in the flood but thankfully rescue operations are underway across
the border in India.
