Landfill collapse kills 30 in Guinea
Conakry, GUINEA—Thirty people died in Guinea’s capital Conakry on Sunday when a mound of rubbish in a landfill collapsed before dawn onto neighboring homes following heavy rains, the government said.
Authorities said that heavy rains, which started at around 2 a.m., washed over the refuse at Dar es Salaam—the largest landfill in Conakry—and triggered a landslide that buried nearby shacks. A search and rescue operation was underway to find survivors. Six people were seriously injured and several homes were destroyed.
The site, an open-air waste dump which is the largest in the city, had been designated for closure on Sunday, according to Lt. Col. Baldé Mamadou Bailo, the sanitation officer for the military engineering battalion.
Locals living around the landfill had been given eviction notices, which forced many to leave the area, but many others were still around at the time of the disaster, according to authorities.
Relocation
“We will ensure that the remaining families are relocated elsewhere,” Dienabou Touré, the minister of territorial administration and decentralization, said at the scene.
Guinea is mineral-rich with huge deposits of bauxite—the largest in the world—and also has iron ore, gold, diamonds and minerals. However, according to the World Bank, 43.7 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line.
“Significant material and human resources have been deployed to search for any people who may still be buried, to rescue the victims and to recover the bodies,” the government added.
‘Tragedy’
Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah visited the site of the deadly accident, where Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographers saw excavators take part in a search-and-rescue operation through the collapsed landfill under the gaze of a crowd of onlookers.
Measures have been taken “to ensure medical care for the wounded” and “assistance for those affected by this tragedy,” the government statement said.
Before the official toll’s announcement, neighborhood leader Lancine Sylla had said he feared that many had died in the collapse.
“We have pulled out 18 bodies that were taken to the morgue,” he told AFP.
One of Guinea’s main opposition figures, former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, who is in exile abroad, called the accident “a tragedy that plunges us into dismay.”
“This tragedy is all the more worrying because the closure of the dump had been announced for this Sunday, Aug. 23,” he said on Facebook.
“It is now up to the competent authorities to establish, with full transparency, the circumstances that led to this disaster and to draw all the necessary conclusions,” he added in the statement posted before the release of the death toll.
In recent days, the government had ordered the eviction of people around the site because of fears of a collapse.
Guinea is led by Gen. Mamadi Doumbouya, who came to power in a coup in 2021 before being elected president in December 2025.
******
Get real-time news updates: inqnews.net/inqviber
