The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.
With many thanks to a loyal reader for highlighting the issue, there is the sad news this morning of yet another tailings landslide. The event occurred early on Saturday morning, 22 March 2025, at the PT IMIP Morowali area, in Fatufia in Bahodopi District, Morowali Regency in Sulawesi, Indonesia. News reports in Indonesian indicate that three people, all workers at the site, were killed.
This is the sixth major tailings incident this year so far.
The precise location of this event is unclear, and there is much uncertainty about what has happened. Unfortunately, this is also an area in which it is very difficult to get good satellite imagery due to high levels of cloud cover. On Google Maps, the image below shows the area known as Fatufia:-
If this is correct, then the most likely location for the landslide is the area below, centred on [-2.86012, 122.14528]:-
The various news reports about the landslide indicate that this area had been affected by heavy rainfall, and that the landslide buried a series of excavators that the three men were operating. A further landslide occurred at 17:07 on the same day.
There is a slightly intriguing aspect to this event, however. This area has been affected by heavy rainfall over the last week, and flooding has occurred. A video was posted to Instagram that shows large-scale flooding in the same area on 16/17 March 2025:-
And there is another video of the same event:-
Now, this is an area in which large-scale mining is developing extremely quickly. One possible explanation for the videos is that this mining activity is leading to massive erosion during heavy rainfall, triggering flooding. But, one does need to worry about the way in which these tailings are being managed too. There is an interesting article (in Indonesian) in which the Tanah Merdeka Foundation (Free Earth Foundation) highlights concerns about mining in this area. This suggests that the floods on 16 March 2025 were also associated with poor tailings management:
“According to Richard [Labiro from Tanah Merdeka Foundation], high rainfall as a cause of flooding resulted in the collapse of the embankment of the tailings storage facility, such as the flood incident on March 16, 2024.
The flood is suspected to be related to the collapse of the dam in the tailings storage facility area of PT Huayue Nickel Cobalt. It is known that the flood on March 16, 2025 hit Labota Village and the IMIP area which affected 341 families or 1,092 people in Labota Village.”
So, has there been two tailings events at Latufia? The first on 16/17 March, with extensive flooding downstream, and a second one on 22 March that killed three people?
Thus, at present there is little clarity about exactly what has happened at Fatufia, but there must be very real concerns about the ways in which tailings, and indeed the whole mining operation, are being managed.
