The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

Landslides in the jade mining area of Hpakant in Myanmar have been a regular theme of this blog over the years. This is a mining area on an epic scale, but it is also a true wild west, with poor oversight and inadequately planned operations. It is likely that many smaller events are not reported, but news does seep out when large failures occur.

The latest of this sorry line of mining landslides occurred yesterday in the Hpakant area. The Eleven Media Group has a reasonably detailed report, indicating that the event was the collapse of a jade mining pond that submerged 50 homes. They report that 12 bodies have been recovered, but that at least 30 people have been killed.

Their report described the event thus:

“Eyewitnesses reported that the collapse occurred when waste soil piled by the company exerted pressure, causing sludge from underground to overflow and breach the pond.”

Other reports indicate a higher loss of life.

There is a video on Youtube that shows the aftermath – this provides a dismal perspective of the site:-

This view, taken from the video, appears to show the aftermath of a flow type landslide. The likelihood of survivors is low:-

Locating events in the Hpakant area is extremely difficult. Media reports translate the name as Spott, Sa Paut or Sput, none of which appear in Geoname searches. The video appears to show a site that is bounded by at least some areas that have not been mined, which may suggest that this site is on the periphery of the main mining area.

NP News reports that the site is in the Bazan Chaung area of Sput Village, which is in the Seikmu Village Tract. Seikmu is located at [25.5839, 96.2872].

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