A devastating landslide has claimed over 2,000 lives in the island nation of Papua New Guinea. We look at the geological reasons behind this region’s vulnerability to natural disasters. Also: why wealth matters in these disasters.
The lead image: is a tatanua mask from Papua New Guinea that is worn during funeral dances.
Tell me about this landslide…
Let’s start with Papua New Guinea—so you get a better sense of where this happened.
About the country: It is located on the world’s second largest island—New Guinea—along with a number of smaller islands. It occupies the eastern half—while the other half is made up of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua. It is located right here:
The economy: Papua New Guinea is mostly rural—and rich in natural resources—mined by foreign companies. Mining accounts for a quarter of its GDP. The area that bore the brunt of the landslide is close to the Porgera gold mine operated by the Canadian company Barrick Gold—along with Zijin Mining out of China. The mine “has produced billions of dollars of gold but whose security personnel have been accused by rights groups of abuses.”
The people: Papua New Guinea is populated by a mixture of tribes—who are generally referred to as Melanesians. The nation’s population of 8.9 million is divided along ethnic and linguistic lines—which has been a complicating factor in this tragedy:
Even before the disaster, the region had been experiencing tribal clashes that led people to flee surrounding villages, with many ending up concentrated in the community buried in the landslide. In September of last year, much of Enga was in a government lockdown and under a curfew, with no flights in or out.
Ok now tell me what happened…
The landslide hit a village called Kaokalam—about 600 km from the capital, Port Moresby. The region is mountainous and remote. It hit at 3 am on Friday—which means most people were asleep. As one aid official puts it: “This is a landslide of massive proportion. It’s quite astonishing—a whole mountain literally fell on so many households during the middle of the night.” As you can see, that’s not an exaggeration:
Buried alive: The village of Yambali—with 4,000+ residents—was also buried by the landslide. As was the highway connecting it to the capital. This means rescue has been slow and painful: “Emergency responders… had to make the final 200 metres of the journey by foot over the rubble-covered highway.” Survivors have been forced to dig for their loved ones with shovels—or worse, bare hands:
Evit Kambu shared that she had lost more than a dozen family members in the disaster. “I have 18 of my family members buried under the debris and soil that I am standing on and a lot more family members in the village I cannot count,” she told Reuters news agency. “I am the landowner here… but I cannot retrieve the bodies so I am standing here helplessly.”
The debris is 20-26 feet deep—and covers an area the size of three or four football fields. The first excavator donated by a local builder arrived on Sunday.
The death toll: has soared upwards since Friday—increasing from 100 to 670 and is now more than 2,000. You can see the devastation below:
Not out of danger: The terrain is still unstable and the earth has continued to shift. Things are getting worse, not better—despite the presence of rescue crews:
The debris is getting increasingly waterlogged from three streams covered by the landslide, making it dangerous to work on and increasing the possibility it could slide farther downhill. Communities below have already been evacuated, [UN IOM chief Serhan] Aktoprak said. “We have a situation that is getting worse and worse every moment,” he said.
There are warnings of a new landslide. The focus now is on evacuating the survivors to prevent a further catastrophe.
Complicating matters: is the recent tribal violence—which has been exacerbated by the landslide. Aid workers have to be accompanied by the military for their own safety.
Ok, what triggered the landslide?
Location. PNG is very prone to natural disasters of every kind—floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanic activity, tsunamis, and sea-level rise. All of it made worse by climate change.
The problem of rain: PNG is a tropical island that receives lots of heavy rainfall—which leads to more erosion, flooding and higher tides. The result: bigger, badder landslides:
[P]robably the most common driver we see for landslides worldwide is rainfall… Say you have lots of rain. What that effectively does is it reduces the strength of the soil. When that soil strength decreases, it can reach a point where it fails, and naturally just slides away.
Ring of disaster: On top of that, PNG sits in the so-called Ring of Fire—part of the world that witnesses the most earthquakes and volcanic activity:
About 90% of all earthquakes strike within the Ring of Fire. This means people's lives are under almost constant threat in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and other island nations like the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and many more in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, all the way east to the western seaboard of the North and South Americas.
It’s shaped more like a horseshoe rather than a ring—and is 40,000 km long. You can see it below:
The double whammy: So this is what happens when you have a region that experiences both earthquakes and heavy rainfall:
Pressure changes during an earthquake create an effect in the soil called liquefaction, where the soil itself acts as a fluid. When lots of water is present in the soil, as is the case now during the monsoon season in Papua New Guinea, liquefaction can happen even more easily.
That’s when mountain slopes start to collapse—like the stacked pile of apples you bumped into at the grocery store. Land is always sliding in PNG—14 people were buried alive in April, and at least 21 people died in three separate landslides across the country in March.
But, but, but: All nations in the Ring of Fire do not suffer equally. Wealth matters—even when it comes to natural disasters. Between 1950 and 2011, landslides killed an average of 23 people per event in developing nations—compared to only six per flow in advanced economies. Poorer countries have less emergency resources and infrastructure—and no warning systems. More importantly, their people are more likely to live in rural areas:
[L]ess than one-fifth of PNG's known population lives in urban centres, and the majority of those that live elsewhere depend on subsistence farming, which needs a certain amount of land. Given the country's growing population and hilly landscape, this means people are more likely to live in areas at risk of landslides — areas which are also harder for emergency services to reach.
Throw in human activity: Areas that experienced deadly landslides are still being mined for gold, silver, nickel etc. And PNG depends heavily on exports of palm oil—which requires extensive deforestation. Catastrophe is inevitable—a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.
The bottomline: Papua New Guinea is a reminder of the timebomb in our backyard—in places like Uttarakhand—which also boasts the trifecta of imminent disaster: earthquakes, heavy rain, and destructive human activity.
Reading list
New York Times, Associated Press, and The Guardian have the best overview. ABC Australia explains why PNG experiences so many landslides with a high body count. A Joshua West in The Conversation and VOA News offer a lengthier explanation on why developing countries suffer more—from a global point of view. For more on the Ring of Fire, check out Deutsche Welle. The Atlantic on the impact of climate change is a very good read.
