Most of the dead are believed to be women and children, AFP reports, citing Ethiopian officials.
The Koshe Garbage Landfill has been a dumping ground for the Ethiopian capital for nearly half a century, absorbing most of the nearly 300,000 tons of waste the capital generates each year. Some 500 waste pickers are believed to visit the dump every day, sifting through the waste of the better off for anything of value. Some choose to live near the sprawling dump because housing there is so cheap.
About 150 people are thought to have been on the dump site when the landslide occurred Saturday night, a resident told AP. Mayor of Addis Ababa Diriba Kuma said 37 people had been rescued and taken for medical treatment.
This is not the first landslide at the dump site, which stretches for more than 30 hectares and supports a hierarchy of scratchers who look for food, materials or resellable items in its muck.
"My house was right inside there," Tebeju Asres told AP, pointing to an muddy area excavators were digging out. "My mother and three of my sisters were there when the landslide happened. Now I don't know the fate of all of them."
Residents say this is not the first landslide to occur there, though it appears to be by far the deadliest. Dumping at the site had been stopped for a few years, but resumed after local farmers blocked dumping in a new landfill built in their area, AFP reports.
The mayor said people living near the dump will be resettled "in the long run."
A $120-million deal between a UK company and the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation in 2013 intends to turn the "towering mountain of waste" into clean energy. Reports on the progress of the project as late as last year suggested it would have launched by now.
Ethiopia has one of Africa's fastest-growing economies and is predicted by the World Bank to become a middle-income country by 2025. A 2014 report pointed out that when the landfill was built more than 40 years ago, it was on the outskirts of the capital. Now, the city encircles it. Though poverty has fallen faster in Ethiopia than in the rest of sub-Sarahan Africa, about 30% of the population still lives in poverty.
The country has been under a state of emergency since October, after dozens were killed during protests for more political freedoms. The right to public assembly remains curtailed.
