A hillside of garbage gave way in Guinea’s capital on Sunday, August 23, 2026, killing at least 30 people as it swallowed the shacks packed against its base and pinned residents under tons of refuse.
The dump that failed was Dar Es Salam, the largest waste site in Conakry, the seaside capital of the West African nation. Years of dumping had piled it into a mountain of trash, with informal housing crowded against its edges — an arrangement common in cities where scavengers make a living sorting through what others throw out.
Beneath the mound, the weight of the sliding waste caved in a three-story building. Guinea’s government put the number of injured at 22 — six seriously and 16 lightly hurt — according to a government statement, and several homes were flattened. As of Monday, August 24, the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralization said several people remained unaccounted for.
The slope let go at about 3 a.m. An overnight downpour had soaked the refuse, authorities said, leaving the landfill dangerously unstable. Staff with ANGUCH, the government body responsible for emergencies and humanitarian disasters, were photographed at the scene as crews worked across the shifting slope of garbage. Neighbors were seen walking out of their homes in the hours that followed, carrying what they could.
Robert Kamano Sâa, an eyewitness, described what happened as rescuers reached the scene: “The first section gave way. People tried to come to the rescue, shouting, ‘Is there anyone down there?’ … That was when the second section collapsed in three successive stages, cascading down. And that is what poured onto the people.”
Excavators were photographed clawing through the collapsed landfill on Sunday, August 23, as Prime Minister Amadou Oury Bah visited the site. “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 said.
Cire Diallo, a woman at the site, told reporters that her five children were killed. “I have lost all my children. All I can do is put my trust in God,” she said. As of August 24, Guinea’s government had sent military personnel and heavy machinery to assist rescue teams as heavy rain persisted.
A Landfill That Was Due to Close
Sharpening the disaster is a simple fact: the site was not supposed to be operating at all. Officials had raised alarms about hazardous conditions there, and the landfill was originally set to close on Sunday, according to Lt. Col. Baldé Mamadou Bailo, who oversees sanitation for the army’s engineering battalion.
The decision followed an earlier incident at the dump in recent years that had raised concerns about safety. Officials also served eviction notices on the residents living beside the landfill, a precaution that required them to leave.
The notices never emptied the neighborhood. Families with nowhere else to go have long treated the dump as both hazard and livelihood, and many were still in the immediate vicinity when the waste came down.
Exiled opposition figure and former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo called the collapse “a tragedy that plunges us into dismay,” adding that it was “all the more worrying because the closure of the dump had been announced for this Sunday, August 23,” and that authorities must “establish, with full transparency, the circumstances that led to this disaster,” he said on Facebook.
At the scene, Guinea’s minister of territorial administration and decentralization, Dienabou Touré, said: “We will ensure that the remaining families are relocated elsewhere.”
Echoes of a 2017 Mudslide
This is not the first time the landfill has turned deadly. Torrential rains in 2017 set off a mudslide there that left at least eight people dead, and for years afterward the ever-growing pile drew warnings about its stability.
Heavy rain turns waste sites like Dar Es Salam into a well-documented danger. Water seeps into loosely packed trash, adding weight and greasing the layers until the slope fails — usually with little warning and tremendous force. Conakry’s rainy season delivers sustained downpours, which makes that risk both seasonal and recurring.
No final accounting of the dead or the missing had been released, and crews faced the grim job of digging through an unsteady mass of garbage looking for survivors. Officials warned the toll could climb; the government’s count of 30 still stood on Monday, August 24.
The surrounding community is left with immediate questions. Where will displaced families sleep? How will the destroyed homes be replaced? And will the closure that was meant to take effect Sunday now be enforced? Until that morning, those families had been living in the shadow of the city’s biggest dump.
