Papua New Guinea landslide explained (2024)

A massive landslide swept through a remote area of northern Papua New Guinea early on May 24, burying a village in a remote part of the country difficult to reach for aid workers and heavy excavation equipment.

Villagers are still trying to move debris as high as two stories with spades, sticks and their bare hands. What machinery has made it to the remote site often cannot be used because the unstable ground could slide further. Only six bodies have been pulled from the rubble so far and officials say they don’t expect many survivors.

Papua New Guinean authorities are still trying to piece together the death toll. Officials estimate around 8,000 people lived in the area and its surrounds. The government said on Sunday 2,000 people had been buried alive, but a U.N. estimate later that day put the death toll at around 670. A local businessman and former official told Reuters on Tuesday it was closer to 160.

Without a current census – the last credible one was done in 2000 – officials are relying on incomplete voter records and checks with local leaders, a task all the harder because of patchy reception, limited electricity and poor roads.

Reuters counted around 20 structures in the path of the landslide, based on a Maxar satellite image taken 11 months ago. An analysis from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) said 18 structures were damaged or destroyed based on building footprint data.

However, locals told Reuters that more homes and buildings had been built over the past year. Some homes were also underneath trees and obscured from satellites.

Provincial authorities say the population has grown in the past year due to people fleeing tribal warfare nearby. The planned reopening of the nearby Porgera gold mine, slated for earlier this year, may have also drawn people back to the region.

Diverging death tolls

The widely ranging death tolls have been in the spotlight as officials and aid agencies gather facts.

The area appears rural and sparsely populated in satellite imagery, but some of the death toll estimates would require a high population density within the landslide area. Reuters measured the footprint of the landslide at around 90,000 square meters. Here’s how those density calculations compare if evenly distributed.

The landslide crashed through homes and buildings onto a stretch of the Highlands highway which connects the provincial capital of Wabag, roughly 60 kilometers away, to the Porgera gold mine, where the highway ends.

With the only highway blocked, the interior beyond the landslide is cut off. While the mine operator Barrick Gold Corp told Reuters it has supplies for 40 days, a U.N. aid official said there are another 30,000 to 40,000 people isolated on the far side of the highway.

Hillside homes

The village stretched from the edge of the highway back up the mountain, according to people who regularly travel the route. Many of the homes said to have been buried would have been semi-permanent structures with wooden walls and corrugated iron roofs, they say.

Pastor Matthew Tagus travels past the village regularly and said the landscape is mountainous with limestone on both sides of the village and a deep gorge with a river flowing through it about 1 Km downhill from the village.

Unstable ground

The military has ordered thousands to evacuate the area because rain and water flowing underneath the debris is shifting the landslide downhill towards other villages.

The unstable ground makes it extremely dangerous for residents and rescue teams to clear debris, according to Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of the U.N. migration agency's mission in PNG.

"The landslide area is very unstable. When we're up there, we're regularly hearing big explosions where the mountain is, there are still rocks and debris coming down," Enga province disaster committee chairperson Sandis Tsaka told Reuters.

Footage from a remote village in Papua New Guinea shows rock and soil falling from a cleave in a hill and large rocks in the foreground, the destruction in the aftermath of a massive landslide.

Heavy equipment and aid has been slow to arrive at the site in part due to tribal warfare nearby which has forced aid workers to travel in convoys escorted by soldiers and return to the provincial capital at night.

Eight people were killed and 30 homes torched in fighting near the main highway on Saturday. Dozens were killed in an ambush in the province in February.

Home to hundreds of tribes and languages, Papua New Guinea has a long history of tribal warfare. However, the violence in Enga province has ratcheted up over the past decade as villagers swapped bows and arrows for military rifles and elections deepened existing tribal divides, according to Michael Kabuni, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University.

“If someone is killed in an election spat, then the violence will carry on because people will take revenge and the cycle keeps going,” he said.