Forty-six people are missing and seven others died in southern Ecuador, in a landslide caused by heavy rains overnight from Sunday to Monday, according to an official toll.

Dozens of homes were buried in the town of Alausi, in Chimborazo province, about 300 km south of Quito, in an Andean area hit last week by an earthquake that killed 15 people, including one in neighbouring Peru.

The landslide left 46 people missing, seven dead and 23 injured, Ecuadorian authorities said Monday in a new assessment. A first official assessment reported 16 dead and seven missing. Nearly 500 people in total were affected by the flow, on a mountain-clinging neighborhood on the northeastern outskirts of the city.

Little hope of finding survivors

Local media footage showed dozens of rescue workers and civilians bustling around the debris trying to pull out buried people in a ballet of ambulances with flashing lights and sirens.

A huge brownish mudslide suddenly descended from the green mountains surrounding Alausi, home to some 45,000 people. In the disaster area, survivors in tears and grieving faces waited for news of their missing relatives.

"The government is totally active, focused on the tragedy of Alausi," responded on Twitter Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, assuring that teams of firefighters were at work since the early hours of the morning "to help the citizens affected".

"Devil's Nose"

The area where the tragedy occurred had been on "yellow alert" since February for the risk of landslides, due to the severe weather affecting the region in recent weeks. Authorities had also warned of a possible collapse of the E35 road in the Casual area, where part of the mountain had broken off.

The city of Alausi is known worldwide for the "Devil's Nose", a steep slope through which Ecuador's Trans-Andean railway line passes, a stretch nicknamed the "most difficult train in the world" because of its dangerousness.

Since January, heavy rains have already left 22 people dead and 346 homeless in the country. More than 6,900 homes were damaged and 72 were destroyed, according to authorities. Some 987 incidents were caused by bad weather, such as floods and landslides. In February, rains led to a five-day suspension of crude oil pumping because an oil pipeline threatened to break after a bridge collapsed.

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