Nairobi (CNN)A landslide killed at least 46 people at a waste dump outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Sunday, according to the country’s communications minister, Negeri Lencho.
Officials were still investigating how the landslide at the sprawling Koshe landfill occurred, Lencho said.
Dwellings shown after a landslide in the main city dump of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 12, 2017.
Dwellings shown after a landslide in the main city dump of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 12, 2017.
“It’s a sad story because the government has been trying to resettle the people residing in the area,” Lencho said. The government had also been building a factory to convert waste products at the landfill into electric energy, he said.
He added that security personnel are still searching for people who have been reported missing in the landslide, and that the government is working to resettle the families affected.
Many people at the landfill were “frantically looking for friends and family,” Hope for Korah, a Canadian NGO that assists people living in the area near the dump, said on its Facebook page. Some of the people who were trapped in the landslide made calls from their phones in the hopes of being rescued, the group said. One woman and her three children managed to scramble to safety just as their home became caught up in the landslide, according to the NGO.
A similar landslide occurred in December 2015 at a waste dump in Shenzhen, China, killing 58.
