Drone footage of the 6 July 2024 landslide at Tulabolo in Sulawesi

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

On 6 July 2024, a landslide struck a mining community located at Tulabolo, which is in the Bone Bolango district of Gorontalo province, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Recovery operations continue at the landslide site, hampered by the very remote location, but it is thought that the landslide killed 58 people, with 23 bodies having been recovered to date.

According to Google Maps, Tulabolo is located at [0.49604, 123.2734], although this is not the precise location of the mine. The operations at this site were unlicenced / artisanal, with manual extraction to retrieve gold, but interestingly there is also licenced mining in the area around Tulabolo, which has created severe local tensions. A paper was published last year (Meutia et al. 2023) that examines artisanal gold mining in Indonesia, with Tulobolo as study site. This describes the following impacts of gold mining at this locality:-

“Illegal [Artisanal Small Gold Mining] activities also result in various environmental changes, including changes in the landscape, changes in the habitats of flora and fauna, changes in the soil structure, changes in surface and groundwater flow patterns, and so on. Ignorance of the environmental impact of miners coming from outside the area has also exacerbated environmental damage in the gold mining area in Bone Bolango.”

Meutia et al. (2023) have also highlighted the hazards associated with mining in the area:-

“The presence of the company’s gold mine is also considered to have damaged the surrounding environment and created a more severe disaster risk. Not long ago, there were flash floods in Bone Raya, resulting in landslides that claimed lives, and threats of even worse disasters. On 7 September 2020, in Bone Raya District, there was a flash flood and landslide caused by high rainfall, which claimed a great deal of lives and property. It can therefore be imagined that should the mining company fully operate by digging forests and land with open-pit mining, the threat of disaster could become even worse.”

Yesterday, drone footage was posted to Youtube that shows the aftermath of the landslide:-

The image below is from a different version of this video, showing the upper part of the landslide:-

The failure appears to have occurred in deeply weathered regolith / bedrock, with a reasonably deep-seated failure scar. Note the track leading to the upper part of the landslide on the left hand side of the image. This meets the landslide scar at the toe of the deep seated portion of the landslide, so I would suggest that the initial failure was triggered by mining in this area. The landslide has then entrained a large volume of material on the lower portions of the slope.

The impact on the village at the toe of the slope is appalling:-

The runout of the landslide has crossed the stream and has crashed through the houses. There is little left of the properties, which had effectively no resistance to the mobile debris.

Melanie Froude and I highlighted the dreadful impact of landslides associated with unlicensed mining in our paper a few years ago (Froude and Petley 2018), and a few years ago I wrote a blog post specifically about this issue. The picture has not improved since, with hundreds of lives being lost each year. Events in recent months have included:-

• 8 June 2024 at Bougani in Mali: 40 deaths
• 4 June 2024 at Chipwi in Myanmar: 25 deaths
• 3 June 2024 at at Farin in Nigeria: 30 deaths

Meutia et al. (2023) highlight the measures needed to reduce this needless waste of life:-

“…[T]he necessity to change the mindset of the community regarding gold mining activities is imperative. This also includes the urgent need to implement good mining practices that are environmentally sound. While fostering environmental awareness within the traditional mining sector, local governments must actively supervise mining activities, strictly and consistently applying various regulations in the field of mining and environmental management, and must help traditional mining activities comply with legal principles, especially with regard to the protection and management of the living environment.”

Sadly, in many poorer countries there is little sign of this type of action being taken.

References

Froude, M. J. and Petley, D. N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science, 18, 2161-2181, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018.

Meutia, A.A., et al. 2024. Environment Degradation, Health Threats, and Legality at the Artisanal Small-Scale Gold Mining Sites in Indonesia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20 [18], 6774. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20186774.

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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