Guinea’s government has moved into a visible emergency-response phase following the 23 August landslide at the Dar Es Salam landfill in Conakry’s Gbessia commune, which killed 30 people. More than 350 displaced residents have been relocated into 21 repurposed classrooms at a school in Dixinn, where the national emergency management agency, ANGUCH, secured the space and distributed food rations through the first night. Territorial Administration Minister Djenabou Touré, who visited the site the morning after the collapse, announced the first concrete measures: a security perimeter around the landfill to keep people, including children reportedly seen near the search operation, away from further danger, alongside the relocation effort itself.
The minister’s own comments at the site are worth recording directly, because they confirm what TMG flagged in its first report on this disaster. Touré said plainly that authorities had already taken steps in response to the risk the site posed. That statement lines up with the timeline: her ministry had announced the landfill’s closure just three days before the collapse, on 20 August, specifically citing safety concerns.
A detail that sharpens the story further, and was not available when TMG first covered the collapse, is that this is not Dar Es Salam’s first fatal incident. A nearly identical landslide struck the same landfill in August 2017, killing multiple people, an event commemorated by local youth associations as recently as August 2025, a week’s anniversary vigil that included a direct appeal to Guinea’s president and prime minister to act. The 2026 collapse fell within days of that same calendar marker. A landfill that has now produced two deadly collapses roughly nine years apart, with a formal closure order issued only after the second one was already overdue, moves this from an isolated disaster into a pattern of deferred infrastructure risk that survived one round of public mourning and formal government acknowledgment without being resolved.
What to watch: whether the security perimeter and school relocation are temporary emergency measures or the first steps of the permanent site closure and relocation the government had already announced before the collapse; how long the displaced families remain in classroom housing before a longer-term resettlement plan is disclosed; and whether opposition figures who have called for accountability, including UFDG president Cellou Dalein Diallo’s public demand to “draw all the consequences,” succeed in prompting a review of why the 2017 precedent did not lead to earlier closure.