“It was raining all day even from (Saturday) evening and the mountain of garbage was unstable,” said Desiana Kartika Bahari, head of the local rescue agency, after a stack of waste gave way at Bantargebang on Sunday, March 8. At least four people died. Rescuers were still looking for five others on Monday, she told Reuters.
Bantargebang is Indonesia’s biggest landfill, on the outskirts of Jakarta. Desiana said the heavy rain was the likely trigger. Some trucks were unloading garbage at the moment of the collapse, and a food stall stood near the site. “The missing people are the truck drivers and scavengers,” she said, and added that more people could be buried in the landfill.
More than 200 rescuers, among them police and military personnel, were deployed from Monday morning, along with 17 excavators.
The scale of the site
Jakarta and its satellite cities, collectively called Jabodetabek, hold about 42 million people and produce an estimated 14,000 tonnes of waste a day. Bantargebang takes in around 6,500 to 7,000 tons of that daily. It spreads over more than 110 hectares, and a local environment agency official put the amount of trash in place at about 55 million tonnes. It is among the largest open landfills in the world.
Blame and a bigger plan
Environment Minister Hanif Faisol Nurofiq put responsibility on local authorities. He said they had let garbage pile up even though open landfills were banned in 2008. “Bantargebang belongs to the Jakarta administration, so they have to take responsibility,” he told Kompas TV late Sunday while visiting the site. “This incident must truly serve as a bitter lesson for us so that Jakarta can promptly make improvements.”
The Jakarta environmental agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The disaster follows remarks President Prabowo Subianto made last month. He said most of Indonesia’s landfills, which are being gradually phased out, would pass their capacity by 2028. His government plans to invest $3.5 billion in 34 waste-to-energy sites within two years, burning garbage to generate electricity.
It is not the first deadly landfill failure in the country. In West Java in 2005, a landslide at a landfill killed 143 people. A methane gas explosion and heavy rain set it off.
