The mountain that had grown over Conakry for years finally moved in the dark. Around two o'clock Sunday morning, after a night of heavy rain, a slope of rubbish at one of the capital's major waste sites gave way and slid onto the houses built at its edge in the Dar-es-Salam area, killing at least 31 people and injuring 22 more, six of them seriously, according to the government. [1] The dead were asleep when it came.

Guinea deployed soldiers and what its statement called significant resources to dig for survivors through the morning. [1] Excavators worked the slope where rescuers had climbed onto the refuse by hand hours earlier. One eyewitness, Robert Kamano Sâa, told the Associated Press that people ran toward the first collapse to search for anyone trapped, and that many were buried when a second section of the site let go beneath them. [1] A woman told local media five of her children died in the slide. Officials and neighbors alike expect the count to rise, because nobody can say yet how many people were underneath. [1]

A landfill does not collapse without a biography. Conakry's dump grew the way such mountains do, one uncollected decade at a time, and the houses below it were not anomalies but the ordinary arithmetic of a city where land near waste is the land the poor are left. The site sits in a peninsular capital wedged between the Atlantic and the coastal hills, where room to put anything — waste, ports, neighborhoods — ran out generations ago and everything since has been negotiation with geography. Rain was the trigger; gravity was the mechanism; the decision to let a neighborhood sleep beneath years of accumulated refuse was none of those things. The government statement treats Sunday as weather. The people digging through the debris with their hands have begun treating it as an address, asking why the mountain was allowed to keep growing toward them between the rains that come every year.

That question now circulates in the rescue footage passing across Guinean social media, where the framing is less meteorological than municipal. The gap matters because it determines what happens next week. If the collapse is an accident of rain, the response ends with funerals and a new slope angle. If it is negligence with a body count, someone must answer for the zoning, the collection contracts, and every warning that went unanswered, and other neighborhoods beneath other slopes get mapped before the next storm instead of after.

Conakry has buried disasters quickly before, but this one resists anonymity because it happened to sleeping families in numbers no communiqué can soften. At least 31 names, six serious injuries still being treated, and an unknown remainder still under the trash as the excavators work. [1] The rain has stopped. The counting has not. What happens after the counting — whether the families at the mountain's foot are moved, compensated, or simply left beneath the next slope — will say which of Sunday's two explanations the state actually believed, the weather's or its own negligence.

-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo