28 December 2007

Indonesia Landslides

Posted by Dave Petley

I have been trying to work out from the press reports the death toll associated with the landslides in Indonesia on 26th and 27th December. These appear to have been shallow but large failures on deforested slopes, triggered by heavy rain. The best that I have been able to come up with to date is as follows:

26th December: Karanganyar District: 61 fatalties. This appears to include a single landslide that killed about 36 people whilst they were having a meal to celebrate the clearance of an earlier landslide. This is the landslide (Picture from the Boston Globe):


26th December: A further 18 people were killed in Wonogiri District in a number of landslides.
27th December: Some reports suggest that 16 people were killed in a landslide in Eastern Java, though the picture here is sketchy.

The intensity of the rainfall is well-illustrated by the NASA TRMM data for this area (this is the 3 day accumulation as indicated on 27th December 2007):
The red and yellow areas over Java indicate high rainfall intensities.

I will update this page if I can get more information about these landslides