Landslide on Mount Burangrang Buries West Java Village and Marine Training Camp, Leaving Dozens Dead

Rain-soaked mud and rocks tore loose from the slopes of Mount Burangrang in the early hours of Jan. 24, crashing into a village and an Indonesian Marine Corps training camp in West Java and leaving scores of people dead or missing.

Pre-dawn collapse after days of rain

The landslide struck Pasirlangu village in West Bandung Regency between 2:30 and 3 a.m. local time after days of heavy rain. Entire homes were swept away as people slept. A temporary marine camp—where a unit was training for a long deployment to Indonesia’s eastern border—was buried under up to eight meters of debris.

By late Monday, officials reported at least several dozen people confirmed dead and more than 60 missing, though figures shifted as search and rescue teams pulled more bodies from the mud and reconciled overlapping lists of village residents and military personnel. Among the missing were 19 marines from a 23-member unit; four marines were confirmed dead.

“This disaster occurred after heavy rain over two nights,” Navy Chief of Staff Adm. Muhammad Ali told reporters. He said the downpour triggered the slope failure that buried the marines’ training ground and that rescuers were struggling to get heavy machinery into the area because “access roads are narrow and the ground is unstable.”

A major rainy-season disaster

The landslide has become one of the deadliest disasters of Indonesia’s current rainy season and has drawn national attention not only because of the toll on a single village, but because an elite military unit was lost on home soil while preparing for a border assignment.

It has also revived long-running questions about how steep, protected hillsides around the city of Bandung have been carved up for farming and tourism despite repeated warnings of landslide risk.

West Java authorities said the slide destroyed or buried about 30 to 34 houses along a roughly 2-kilometer path, turning a green, terraced landscape into a broken field of brown earth, boulders and uprooted trees. Initial counts suggested 113 residents were in the direct impact zone, with a small number pulled out alive.

Rescue efforts hampered by weather and terrain

Bambang Imanudin, head of emergency and logistics at the West Java disaster management agency, said bad weather repeatedly forced rescuers to halt work. “The team is actually ready, but the heavy rain is causing difficulties,” he said, describing stops and starts as new downpours raised the risk of fresh landslides on already unstable slopes.

On Saturday morning, before formal teams arrived, survivors and neighbors clawed through the mud with their hands, hoes and shovels, searching for relatives. Television footage showed rescuers wading through waist-deep sludge.

Rescue dogs, drones, excavators and water pumps were later brought in by the national search and rescue agency and the National Disaster Management Agency, known by its Indonesian acronym, BNPB. Officials said the number of personnel on the ground grew from about 500 on the first day to more than 2,000 as troops, police and volunteers joined the operation.

For many families, hopes of finding survivors faded quickly.

“It is impossible that they are still alive,” said Pasirlangu resident Aep Saepudin, who told local media he was searching for 11 missing relatives. “I just want their bodies to be found.”

Search teams have had to balance speed with safety. One rescuer said workers sometimes focused on digging for victims without fully monitoring the steep walls of earth above them that still showed signs of slipping. Operations have been suspended at night and during periods of intense rain.

Displacement and an emergency declaration

Authorities in West Bandung have declared a two-week emergency response period, set up temporary shelters and medical posts, and evacuated at least 230 people from the most at-risk areas around the slide. Some local and national officials have cited higher displacement figures of more than 600 people, depending on how extended families and nearby hamlets are counted.

Marines among the missing

The marine unit’s presence has added a sensitive dimension to the tragedy. The troops, part of the Indonesian Navy’s Marine Corps, were conducting field exercises in wooded terrain above the village ahead of a long-duration deployment to the remote Indonesia–Papua New Guinea border region.

Ali said the marines were caught in their camp when the hillside gave way. The Indonesian Army’s Siliwangi Military Command said it was checking reports that additional soldiers might be among the missing, but stressed that those figures remained unconfirmed.

Questions over land use on protected slopes

The disaster is the latest in a string of floods and landslides across Indonesia during the October–April rainy season, which brings intense downpours to the world’s largest archipelagic country. BNPB has reported thousands of disasters each year—roughly half of them floods and landslides—and says Indonesia now averages between 15 and 17 disaster events per day.

Experts and officials say the immediate trigger in West Bandung was the pounding rain that saturated the soil on Mount Burangrang. But they also point to the way people have reshaped the slopes.

Pasirlangu lies within the broader North Bandung Area, a highland zone officially designated as a protected water catchment and conservation area. In practice, environmental groups and some officials say, steep hillsides have been cleared or terraced for vegetable fields, small plantations, villas and tourist attractions.

West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi said surrounding plantations, especially vegetable plots on steep land, had contributed to the disaster. He promised to move residents away from slopes considered highly prone to landslides.

“The plantations around this area, mostly vegetable farms, have made the land vulnerable,” Mulyadi said, adding that the government would relocate people living directly under unstable hillsides.

Relocation in Indonesia has proved contentious in past disasters, as poor households with insecure land titles fear losing access to their only means of livelihood. Farmers cultivating marginal land in highland areas often have few alternatives to support their families, and previous moves to enforce conservation rules have frequently stalled or been applied unevenly.

Environmental advocates and some local planners have argued that blaming small farmers alone risks obscuring years of weak enforcement of zoning rules and the role of larger commercial projects in protected areas. Officials have not publicly detailed any specific enforcement actions tied to tourism or real estate developments around Mount Burangrang since the slide.

National leaders have used recent disasters to call for tighter control over land use. Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka, visiting the West Bandung site, urged stronger regulation in high-risk zones. In an earlier disaster in Sumatra, President Prabowo Subianto said Indonesia must prioritize environmental education, reforestation and better spatial planning to reduce the toll from extreme weather.

‘I just want their bodies to be found’

For now, attention in Pasirlangu remains on the search.

Excavators and teams of soldiers in mud-stained uniforms continue to work along the scar cut through the village, watched by families who shelter in school buildings and village halls. The air is thick with the smell of wet soil. Generators buzz as floodlights illuminate the mud at night when conditions allow rescuers to keep digging.

Each recovered body is carried out on a stretcher or in a black bag, past lines of relatives who step forward to check clothing or personal items, hoping for certainty even when the outcome is the one they most feared.

As the death toll rises, the disaster has laid bare how quickly steep, rain-lashed slopes can fail when they have been carved and settled—and how both villagers and professional soldiers can be overwhelmed in minutes when that happens. Long after the search teams leave Pasirlangu, Indonesia will face the unresolved question of whether it can change the way its hillsides are used before the next hillside comes down.