Sierra Leone: The Mountain Will Fall
Investigating the causes and consequences of a mud slide in Sierra Leone that killed more than a thousand people.
In August 2017, a devastating landslide in Sierra Leone, killed over a thousand people.
It was a terrible blow to a country that still bears the scars of a brutal civil war that ended two decades ago and the more recent, but equally appalling, Ebola crisis, which stretched the nation’s limited resources to breaking point.
Initially, freak rains brought on by climate change were thought to be the cause, but then other stories emerged – of corruption, greed and environmental degradation, of disastrous urban expansion and unheeded laws.
It became clear that the catastrophe may have been as least as much a consequence of local failings as the result of global weather events. What’s more, there had been stark warnings of looming disaster for many years.
Filmmaker Paul Glynn, who’d first heard these predictions while living in Sierra Leone a decade ago, went back to find out why they’d been so tragically ignored.
Also read: The day the mountain collapsed: Sierra Leone’s mudslide.