Landslide at landfill kills 31 people in Guinea capital

CONAKRY —At least 31 people have been killed after a mound of rubbish at a major waste site collapsed onto nearby homes in Guinea’s capital Conakry early on Sunday, according to the central government.Authorities said heavy rains washed over the refuse at Dar Es Salam — the largest landfill in Conakry — and triggered a landslide that buried nearby shacks. Another 22 people were injured, including six seriously, and several homes were destroyed.”Significant” resources and personnel, including the military, were deployed to search for survivors after the collapse at about 02:00 local time following heavy rain overnight, the government added in a statement.One woman told local media her five children had died in the disaster. There are fears that the death toll will rise further.Rescuers were later seen using excavators to comb through a mountain of scattered rubbish at the site as local residents gathered nearby.Guinea’s Prime Minister Mamadou Oury Bah visited the scene to assess the situation and oversee the search efforts.Neighborhood leader Lancine Sylla had earlier told the AFP news agency that he feared there would be a heavy death toll.”We have pulled out 18 bodies that were taken to the morgue,” he said.Visiting the injured in hospital, Health Minister Khaïté Sall said they would get free medical care, while assuring families of government support.Guinea’s opposition figure and 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 landfill had been announced for this Sunday, 23 August”, he said.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.Guinea has experienced similar landslide tragedies before, with 10 people being killed at the same site in 2017.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.“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% of the population lives below the national poverty line.