Indonesia: Landslide kills miners in Nusa Tenggara Province

The Jakarta Globe is today reporting a quite large landslide at Buwun
Mas village in West Nusa Tenggara Province. This slide is reported to
have killed at least four people, with a further 11 potential victims
believed to be buried in the debris. The report is quite interesting
as it says that: “The area, [Rustam Pakaya, the head of the Ministry
of Health’s Crisis Center] said, is used for illegal gold mining.

“We
are still searching for the missing people,” Rustam said. “We don’t
have any information yet on who these victims are. We don’t know if
they are miners or not.” It should be said that other, unfortunately
non-local, reports are rather more certain about the mining issue: “A
landslide at a gold mine killed four workers and left 11 missing on
the Indonesian island of Lombok, a Health Ministry official said
Sunday.” Fortunately, this is an area with excellent Google Earth
imagery!

Given that this is an area of illegal mining and extensive
deforestation, the occurrence of destructive landslides should not be
a surprise. The level of vulnerability here is indicated by the fact
that the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission have not detected
unusually high levels of rainfall in this area over the last few days.

The combination of deforestation and mining in tropical environments
is really bad news from a landslide perspective.
http://daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/landslide-in-lombok-indonesia.html