Six more bodies, including those of two children, were recovered on Wednesday from the site of a massive garbage landslide in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, raising the death toll to 30, according to police.
Several dozen people are still unaccounted for following the collapse at the Kiteezi landfill in the northern district on Saturday, which buried people, homes, and livestock under mountains of decaying waste.
“Today, the team retrieved six dead bodies by 1730 hours (1430 GMT). This makes a total of 30 bodies so far recovered,” the Uganda Police Force said on X, formerly Twitter.
The latest victims found included a three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl, according to a list posted by the police.
Earlier, Kampala metropolitan police spokesman Patrick Onyango reported a death toll of 26, with 39 people still missing—35 local residents and four garbage collectors.
Excavators have been working tirelessly, often through torrential downpours, to search for survivors in the massive rubbish mounds at Kiteezi. The Uganda police reported that 120 people were taking shelter in a nearby school, while 33 homes are suspected to have been engulfed in the landslide triggered by heavy rains in the area.
Kampala city mayor Erias Lukwago has called the incident a “national disaster,” warning that “many, many more could still be buried in the heap.” He had previously raised concerns about the risks of overflowing waste from the site, which was established in 1996 and receives nearly all the garbage collected across Kampala.
On Sunday, President Yoweri Museveni said he had ordered the army’s special forces to assist in the search and rescue operation and demanded answers about who allowed people to live near such a “potentially hazardous and dangerous heap.
” Museveni announced on X that he had authorized payments to the victims’ families of five million Ugandan shillings ($1,300) for each fatality and one million shillings ($270) for each injured person.
However, residents of the area have expressed anger toward the authorities, accusing them of knowing about the dangers and doing little to mitigate them. 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.
