A moment of ordinary childhood children at play, children simply existing in their neighbourhood ended in death and devastation when an unfinished building at 87 Blackhall Road, Kissy, collapsed without warning, killing two children and leaving a third fighting for their life.
The tragic incident, which occurred opposite the well-known Mendi Church in one of Freetown’s most densely populated eastern communities, has sent shockwaves through the neighbourhood and reignited urgent questions about the safety crisis quietly unfolding across the capital one building, one family, one shattered childhood at a time.
Details of the collapse are still emerging. What is known is this: two children have lost their lives. A third remains in critical condition, their fate uncertain. A community is in mourning. And behind the grief lies a question that is becoming grimly familiar in Freetown — why was this building allowed to stand unfinished, unsecured, and accessible to the children who played near it?
Blackhall Road sits in the heart of Kissy, the sprawling, teeming suburb that fans out through Freetown’s eastern reaches. It is a community shaped by proximity homes pressed close together, streets alive with activity, children a constant, visible presence. The Mendi Church, a historic landmark in the area, marks a gathering point for the community, and the surrounding streets are among the most trafficked in the neighbourhood.
Number 87 is or was an unfinished structure. Like hundreds of similar buildings scattered across Freetown, it stood in a state of suspension: construction started, construction stalled, the skeleton of someone’s ambition left to weather the seasons and, in the worst cases, to collapse under its own unchecked structural failure.
On this day, children were near it. And then the building came down.
Emergency responders reached the scene, and two young lives could not be saved. The third child was rushed for medical attention and remains in a critical condition.
This tragedy did not happen in isolation. It is the latest in a devastating sequence of building collapses that have claimed lives in Freetown with numbing regularity, each one met with grief, outrage, and promises of reform and each one followed, in time, by another.
In September 2024, a seven-storey building on Shell Bai Bureh Road in eastern Freetown just kilometres from Blackhall Road collapsed between 11am and 12pm, killing at least eight people, including three children under the age of five. Rescue teams worked for days through the rubble. A subsequent report from the Sierra Leone Institute of Engineers confirmed what many had feared: the building had been constructed using substandard materials and poor building practices. By the time the rescue operation concluded, 16 people had died.
The pattern is consistent and damning. Rapid urbanisation, fuelled by unregulated construction practices, has created conditions where buildings are erected without regard for safety standards, with weak concrete, rusting steel, and poor-quality cement contributing to structural failure across the country. The Ministry of Lands, Freetown City Council, the National Disaster Management Agency, the Ministry of Trade, and the Standards Bureau all responsible for regulating construction standards have repeatedly come under fire for their failure to uphold basic building safety regulations.
Inspections that should be mandatory are often bypassed. Unfinished buildings structures like the one at 87 Blackhall Road are left standing in communities without fencing, without warnings, without any barrier between curious children and tonnes of unsecured concrete and iron.
Concerns about the quality of construction materials have grown for years, with experts noting that poor materials coupled with inadequate construction practices have led to a rise in building collapses across Sierra Leone. Journalists raised the alarm. Engineers raised the alarm. Civil society raised the alarm. Still, the buildings keep falling.
What makes the Blackhall Road collapse particularly devastating and particularly instructive is that the victims are children. Not residents trapped in a collapsing home. Not workers caught inside a structure mid-construction. Children, near an unfinished building in their own neighbourhood, in a community they should have been safe to exist in.
This is not an abstract policy failure. It is what policy failure looks like in human terms: two small lives ended beneath rubble, a third child in critical condition in a hospital, a family that woke up that morning with no reason to believe the day would end this way.
Unfinished buildings are a common feature of Freetown’s urban landscape. Some have stood in their current states for years — frames of concrete jutting upward, rebar exposed, walls incomplete, foundations sometimes already compromised. In a city where children play in every available space and communities spill out into every corner, these structures represent a silent, ongoing hazard. No fence. No warning sign. No accountability for who bears responsibility if someone especially a child is hurt.
Sierra Leone has laws and institutions that exist precisely to prevent tragedies like this one. The question that must now be answered is not only why this particular building collapsed though that question demands a full investigation but why it was permitted to remain as it was, in the state it was, for as long as it was, in a neighbourhood where children are constantly present.
Who approved the original construction? Who was responsible for monitoring its progress and its safety? When construction stalled, who was notified? Was any authority ever alerted to the state of the structure? Was any inspection carried out? Was any enforcement action taken?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that the families of the victims deserve to have answered, and the community of Kissy deserves to have answered, and the residents of Freetown who live in the shadow of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar structures deserve to have answered.
Criticism of the government’s handling of construction regulation has reached a boiling point in recent years, with citizens calling for independent investigations and a complete overhaul of the agencies responsible for building oversight. After the Shell Road collapse, one eyewitness told reporters: “How many more buildings need to fall before these officials are held accountable? People are dying because of their greed.”
Those words now echo across Blackhall Road.
Kissy is a community that knows hardship. It is one of the oldest, most densely populated suburbs in Freetown a place of resilience and community, of churches and mosques and tightly bound neighbourhoods where everyone knows everyone. The area around Blackhall Road and the Mendi Church is a familiar, lived-in part of the city.
Today, it is also a place of grief.
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The children who died were someone’s sons or daughters, someone’s brothers or sisters, someone’s grandchildren. The child fighting for their life in hospital is waiting, as are the people who love them. The community that gathered at the scene, that watched rescuers work through the rubble, that stood in front of the collapsed structure and tried to make sense of what had happened that community deserves more than condolences.
It deserves a system that works. It deserves enforcement. It deserves the basic assurance that unfinished, unsafe buildings will not be permitted to stand unsecured in their streets, where children play.
