Fire Burns Through the Tasa Tera Textile Warehouses in Merkato for Hours

A fire that started at around 7pm on 29 September destroyed property in the Tasa Tera textile and clothing warehouses in Merkato, and burned for hours before it was brought under control.

Tikvah Ethiopia reported that traders working in the area were still trying to get their stock out of the buildings while the fire was running.

Why this particular address

Tasa Tera is wholesale storage, not retail floor space. The businesses that keep stock there are importers and distributors whose entire working inventory sits in one place, usually uninsured, and usually financed on short credit from a supplier or a family lender. A warehouse fire in Merkato is not a property loss spread across many balance sheets. It is a small number of traders losing the whole position at once.

That is also why the recovery pattern is predictable and slow. Replacement stock has to be re-imported, which in the current foreign-exchange regime means queueing for an allocation at a bank auction, at a rate that has moved a long way from where the original consignment was bought. The loss is denominated in old birr and the replacement in new ones.

What has not been established

No casualty figure has been given. The cause has not been determined, and neither the fire service nor the city administration has published an account of the response time or the number of units affected.

Open

The number of businesses that lost stock, the value of the property destroyed, and the cause of the fire are all unreported. Nor is it clear whether any of the affected traders held insurance, or whether the city intends to assess the site's fire safety, as it has after previous Merkato fires.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 29 September 2026