Torrential rains caused a gigantic pile of garbage to become a deadly landslide in Guinea’s capital city of Conakry on Sunday morning, killing at least 30 people as homes were completely buried under the avalanche of refuse.
City sanitation officers said the Dar Es Salam landfill, the largest trash dump in Conakry, was supposed to be shut down on Sunday. Minister of Territorial Administration Djenab Toure announced on Thursday that trash from the unsafe landfill would be relocated to a dump further from the city, which has a population of about two million.
The same site produced a deadly landslide in 2017, killing ten people. Civil engineers had issued evacuation orders for residents of the flimsy shacks constructed around the edge of the landfill, but the orders were widely ignored.
Heavy overnight rains apparently triggered the disaster feared by sanitation engineers, sending three waves of debris cascading down the mountain of garbage. The second wave was the most devastating, according to survivors.
“People tried to come to the rescue. They came running and climbed onto the refuse to see if anyone was there,” said eyewitness Robert Kamao Saa. “That was when the second section collapsed in three successive stages, cascading down. And that is what poured onto the people.”
“I have lost all my children. All I can do is put my trust in God,” said a woman whose five children were buried under the landslide.
“It is very, very difficult to talk about it because seeing a human being lose their life like that is pathetic, it is so painful,” said a man named Mamadouba Bangoura, who lost his home to the landslide but was able to save his family.
Toure visited the scene of the disaster on Monday and promised to “ensure that the remaining families are relocated elsewhere.” Health Minister Khaite Sall said injured victims would receive free medical care.
Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah asked the public to remain calm and cooperate with rescue workers.
“All necessary measures have been taken to ensure medical care for the injured, particularly at Donka National Hospital, as well as assistance to people affected by the disaster,” said Bah.
The current president of Guinea, Mamady Doumbouya, is a military general and coup leader who overthrew former president Alpha Conde in a 2021 coup, then consolidated power by winning the 2025 presidential election in a landslide. When Doumbouya took a luxury vacation in Greece earlier this month with his family on short notice, rumors spread that he was on the verge of retiring due to declining health or might even have been deposed in a soft coup.
Doumbouya has been denounced as a tyrant by the opposition and is often criticized for corruption, as most of the mineral-rich country’s population lives in extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, 3.7 million of Guinea’s 15.1 million inhabitants survive on less than $4.20 per day of income.
Opposition leader and former president Cellou Dalein Diallo, who was driven into exile after the junta dissolved his party, said the landfill collapse was a “tragedy that plunges us into dismay.”
“This tragedy is all the more worrying because the closure of the landfill had been announced for this Sunday, 23 August,” Diallo noted.