In the early hours of a Monday morning in Conakry, a landfill swollen by heavy rain gave way and swallowed the homes built in its shadow, killing at least thirty people and injuring twenty-two more in Guinea's Dar-es-Salam neighborhood. It is a disaster that speaks not only to the force of nature but to the slow accumulation of neglect — the same site collapsed in 2017, and the conditions that made it deadly were never truly resolved. Where cities grow faster than the systems meant to sustain them, the poorest residents are left to live beside the consequences, and when those consequences fall
Landfill collapse in Guinea kills at least 30, fears of rising toll
At least 30 people killed and 22 injured when a rubbish landfill collapsed onto residential homes; one woman lost five children in the disaster.
A mountain of garbage shifted and fell, burying homes in seconds
Mark
Why does a landfill collapse kill so many people? Isn't that something cities can prevent?
Mimi
Because in Conakry, people live right next to the landfill. There's no buffer zone. When the waste pile fails, it falls directly onto homes. It's not an accident waiting to happen—it's a predictable consequence of how the city is organized.
Mark
But they had a collapse in 2017. Didn't that change anything?
Mimi
Apparently not. The same site, the same hazard, nine years later. That's the part that stings. Someone knew this could happen again.
Mark
What about the woman who lost five children?
Mimi
She's one person in a neighborhood where dozens of families are grieving. But yes—five children in one home, gone in seconds. That's the human weight of this.
Mark
Is this about poverty, or about bad governance, or both?
Mimi
Both. Poor people live near landfills because they have nowhere else to go. Governments don't fix the landfills because the people who live there have no political power. It's the intersection of both failures.
Mark
What happens now?
Mimi
The rescue continues. The death toll will likely rise. And then, probably, the landfill will keep operating the same way it always has.
O Pulso
- A garbage mound the size of a small hill collapsed at 2 a.m., burying homes and sleeping families under tons of waste in one of Conakry's most vulnerable neighborhoods.
- At least thirty people are confirmed dead and twenty-two injured, with one mother reporting the loss of five children — and rescuers warn the toll is not yet final.
- Military units and emergency teams deployed excavators through the morning, racing against time to pull survivors and recover bodies from the debris.
- Prime Minister Mamadou Oury Bah arrived at the scene as officials acknowledged the numbers would likely rise, with eighteen bodies already transported to the morgue by midday.
- The disaster is a haunting repetition — the same landfill collapsed in 2017, killing ten, yet the structural hazard and the proximity of homes were never addressed in the years between.
- The tragedy has sharpened urgent questions about waste infrastructure safety in Conakry, where land scarcity forces residents to build beside sites the city has no better place to put.
In the early hours of a Monday morning in Conakry, a landfill swollen by heavy rain gave way and swallowed the homes built in its shadow, killing at least thirty people and injuring twenty-two more in Guinea's Dar-es-Salam neighborhood. It is a disaster that speaks not only to the force of nature but to the slow accumulation of neglect — the same site collapsed in 2017, and the conditions that made it deadly were never truly resolved. Where cities grow faster than the systems meant to sustain them, the poorest residents are left to live beside the consequences, and when those consequences fall, they fall hardest on those with nowhere else to go.
Around 2 a.m. on a Monday, after a night of heavy rain, a vast mound of garbage at Conakry's Dar-es-Salam landfill gave way. It collapsed onto the homes built at its edge, burying families where they slept. At least thirty people died in the rubble, and twenty-two more were injured, six of them critically. Among the voices that emerged from the wreckage was a woman who had lost five of her children in the few seconds it took the ground to shift.
The government responded swiftly. Military personnel and rescue teams arrived with excavators to dig through the refuse, and Prime Minister Mamadou Oury Bah came to the site to oversee the operation. Neighborhood leaders had warned early that the toll would be severe — and as the morning wore on, with eighteen bodies already recovered, officials confirmed the numbers were expected to climb.
What gave the disaster its particular weight was its familiarity. The same landfill had collapsed in 2017, killing ten people. In the nine years between that disaster and this one, little had changed: the waste kept accumulating, the rains kept coming, and the structural risks went unaddressed. The residents living in the landfill's shadow had no real alternative — land in Conakry is scarce, and those with the fewest options build where they can.
As rescue operations continued, the immediate work was finding survivors and recovering the dead. But the deeper failure — a known hazard left unresolved, a community left unprotected, a catastrophe allowed to repeat — was already written in the rubble.
In the predawn darkness of a Monday morning in Conakry, a mountain of garbage shifted and fell. The collapse happened around 2 a.m., after heavy rain had soaked the ground overnight, and when it came down it buried the homes stacked at the edge of Guinea's capital waste site in the Dar-es-Salam neighborhood. At least thirty people died in the rubble. Another twenty-two were hurt, six of them seriously enough to need urgent care.
The government mobilized quickly—military personnel and rescue teams arrived to dig through the scattered refuse with excavators, searching for anyone still alive beneath the tons of waste. By the time neighborhood leaders spoke to journalists, eighteen bodies had already been recovered and taken to the morgue. But the real measure of the disaster emerged in smaller, unbearable details. One woman told local media that five of her children had been killed. She was one voice among many who had lost someone in those few seconds when the ground gave way.
Lancine Sylla, a leader in the neighborhood, had warned rescuers early on that the death toll would be severe. His words proved prescient. As excavators continued their work and residents gathered at the perimeter watching, officials acknowledged that the numbers were likely to climb higher still. Prime Minister Mamadou Oury Bah arrived at the scene to oversee the search and assess what had happened.
What made this disaster particularly grim was that it was not new. In 2017, the same landfill had collapsed, killing ten people. That earlier disaster had apparently changed little about how the site was managed or how the surrounding community was protected. The waste continued to pile up. The rains continued to come. The structural integrity of the mound remained unaddressed. And now, nine years later, the same thing had happened again—only worse.
The collapse raised urgent questions about infrastructure and oversight in a city where waste management systems are already strained. Conakry, like many African capitals, struggles with the sheer volume of garbage its growing population produces. The Dar-es-Salam landfill sits adjacent to residential areas where people have built homes because land is scarce and affordable. Those residents have no choice but to live in the shadow of a mountain of refuse that the city has no better place to put. When that mountain fails, they pay the price.
As rescue operations continued into the day, the focus remained on finding survivors and recovering bodies. But the larger failure—the one that allowed a known hazard to persist, that permitted homes to remain in harm's way, that saw a disaster repeated—was already visible in the rubble.
Citações Notáveis
We have pulled out 18 bodies that were taken to the morgue— Lancine Sylla, neighborhood leader
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Politics & Governance