Death toll from Uganda garbage landslide rises to 26, 39 missing

At least 39 people are still missing following a massive garbage landslide in the Ugandan capital Kampala at the weekend that has so far claimed 26 lives, police said Wednesday.

The dump site in the northern district of Kiteezi collapsed on Saturday after torrential rains, burying people, homes and livestock in mountains of fetid rubbish.

“Thirty-nine people were registered as missing,” Kampala metropolitan police spokesman Patrick Onyango said, adding that the death toll had risen to 26.

“These (the missing) include 35 community members and four garbage collectors,” he said, drawing information from a preliminary recovery operation.

He gave no breakdown for the death toll, but an official has previously said that at least five children were among those who lost their lives.

Excavators have been churning through the huge rubbish mounds, often in heavy downpours, as the desperate search for survivors continues following the collapse.

– ‘National disaster’ –

The incident has been described as a “national disaster” by Kampala city mayor Erias Lukwago, who had warned at the weekend that “many, many more could be still buried in the heap as the rescue operation is ongoing”.

He had raised concerns over risks of overflowing waste from the site, which was established in 1996 and takes in almost all garbage collected across Kampala.

President Yoweri Museveni said on Sunday he had directed the army’s special forces to help in the search and rescue operation and demanded to know who allowed people to live near such a “potentially hazardous and dangerous heap”.

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Museveni said in a statement posted on X that he had ordered payments to the victims’ families of five million Ugandan shillings ($1,300) for each fatality and one million shillings ($270) for each injured person.

But residents of the site have expressed anger towards the authorities, saying they knew about the dangers it posed and had done little to help.

Local community leader Abubaker Semuwemba Lwanyaga told AFP on Monday that officials “should own up and accept the mistake”.

“The government should have relocated people from here if they wanted to put a landfill and compensated them, and not waited for a disaster to happen,” he said.

Several areas in Uganda and other parts of East Africa have been battered by heavy rains recently, including Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent.

Devastating landslides in a remote mountainous area in southern Ethiopia last month killed around 250 people.

In February 2010, mudslides in the Mount Elgon region of eastern Uganda killed more than 350 people.