Deadly landslide in eastern Congo leaves dozens missing after hours of rain

Deadly landslide in eastern Congo leaves dozens missing after hours of rain

Event date: 2026-01-13. A landslide in the village of Burutsi in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo killed at least 13 people and left more than 30 others missing after several hours of intense rainfall, according to local authorities and reporting from the scene.

The disaster struck around 1 a.m. in North Kivu province, in an area where steep terrain and poor access can turn heavy rain into a fast-moving emergency. Local officials said the slide cut off the main road between Goma and Walikale, complicating response efforts and making it harder for government teams to reach the village. One local chief told AP that the hillside collapsed into Burutsi while residents were asleep, leaving families little time to react.

The initial toll is likely to remain fluid because rescue and search work was still underway the next day. Prensa Latina reported that young people from Burutsi and surrounding villages were continuing to search for missing people on January 14. That detail points to a community-led response alongside the official effort, but it also suggests the area was still too difficult for authorities to fully secure or clear immediately after the slide.

The available evidence supports a narrow account: the immediate cause was prolonged heavy rain, the death toll was at least 13, and more than 30 people were missing. The evidence does not provide a confirmed final number of injured people, the identities of the dead, or any official estimate of how many homes were destroyed, so those details are omitted here.

North Kivu has long faced overlapping crises, including armed conflict and severe humanitarian strain, but the supplied evidence does not say the landslide was linked to violence. It does show that the road closure and rough geography made the emergency harder to manage. In that sense, the disaster is both a weather event and an access problem: rain triggered the slide, while damaged transport links slowed the response.

For families in Burutsi, the immediate concern remains the search for survivors and the recovery of the missing. With roads cut and the toll still uncertain, officials and local volunteers were left working against both weather and terrain as the rescue effort continued.

The report also places the landslide in a wider setting of difficult access. North Kivu’s roads are already vulnerable, and the road closure between Goma and Walikale meant the same weather event that caused the slide also slowed aid. That combination is central to understanding why the casualty count can remain provisional for longer than in an urban incident. The evidence supports no claim that anyone could have foreseen the exact timing of the collapse, but it does show how a night of heavy rain turned into an emergency before dawn.

Prensa Latina’s follow-up that young people continued searching the next day reinforces the sense that the recovery phase was still informal and local. That does not make the account less reliable; it instead signals that in remote terrain, community members often become the first search teams when official access is limited. The essential verified facts remain the same: a hillside failed in Burutsi after hours of rain, at least 13 people died, more than 30 were missing, and the route to the area was cut off while response teams tried to reach survivors and recover the dead.