FREETOWN: At least seven people died and hundreds were made homeless as swathes of Sierra Leone’s capital were hit by massive flooding after hours of torrential rain, emergency management officials said Thursday.

Residents described how waters destroyed their homes, swept away household goods and damaged vehicles as Freetown, an overcrowded city of 1.2 million, was pounded overnight.

“The seven corpses were brought in intermittently overnight but we know that more will come,” Amara Kamara, mortuary attendant at the city’s main Connaught Hospital, told AFP.

Among the dead were three children, he said, giving their ages as three, four and 10. Witnesses in the worst-hit areas described seeing people carried away by the floodwater as their homes were destroyed.

“I witnessed two primary school children being swept away when they stepped on a slab... so I am certain the death toll will eventually be higher,” a resident of Brookfields in western Freetown told AFP.

It rains six months of the year in Freetown, one of the world’s wettest cities, and putrid water from its populated slopes inundate its coastal slums every summer, causing cholera, dysentery and respiratory infections.