The latest such are the Bududa District landslides on the slopes of Mt Elgon that last week killed at least 81 people.
The landslides completely wiped out three villages.
Towards the end of the week, the Red Cross said the death toll would rise as some 350 more are still reported missing, the logical explanation being that they are buried and their bodies are yet to be recovered.
More rain churning up the mud has made the search job even harder.
The landslides struck on Monday night and in some cases, there were no survivors as whole families were buried.
Yet again, this is a disaster that has left the government looking bad.
There is little that could have been done to stop the landslides, which are an act of nature, but the fact is that the area should not have been under settlement in the first place.
It turns out that this area had in fact been earmarked for conservation, but politics got in the way.
In other words, this tragedy could have been avoided had we not sacrificed the common good for selfish political gain.
The intriguing thing is that politicians never see this as their own handiwork — they are the first to appear on scene to commiserate with the bereaved.
Every time professional and enforcement organs attempt to flush illegal occupants out of wetlands or to create order in city traffic, the politicians pop up to frustrate the process.
There are many other gazetted areas that should be left to their own devices, if we are to avoid another Bududa.
This begs the question of whether matters are any better on the Kenyan side of Mt Elgon.
The calamity that struck in Bududa can easily strike on the other side of the border, as experts predict that the El Nino rains are not about to let up.
flashad
But what makes these disasters more painful is that the taxpayer bleeds millions to sustain disaster relief bureaucracies that remain completely ineffectual.
Our co-ordination of relief during such calamities is a joke.
With no clear response unit, it is the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces that have carried out search and rescue work all week long.
At the East African Community level, in pipeline is the creation of a regional standby force that, it is expected, will respond to such disasters as part of it other duties.
This is long overdue.
A specialised force to handle such emergencies is what every East African citizen and taxpayer would be happy to pay for.
The sad fact is that in an area where landslides have been reported since the beginning of the 20th century, where steep slopes, high rainfall, typical soil properties and human activity turn the area into an inherently unstable area, this disaster was entirely predictable, and therefore preventable.