The Sidoarjo Disaster
In May 2006, near a densely populated city in Indonesia’s East Java called Sidoarjo, the ground erupted in a volcano of scalding hot mud. As local residents fled their homes, the hole continued to expel toxic gaseous mud, killing 20 people and displacing immediately almost 40,000. Known as the Lusi mudflow, the continuously flowing mud has submerged homes, factories, rice paddies, roads and 12 villages.

For the first several months of the mudflow, the hole expelled about 26 million gallons of mud a day, according to the government agency that oversees disaster recovery. The rate has since slowed to 7 to 15 million gallons a day, but the mudflow shows no signs of stopping. The Indonesian government has built levees to contain the mud and a system to divert the flow into the Porong River, but this infrastructure has failed to contain the mudflow and has needed to be rebuilt several times. By July 2015, the area contained an estimated 1.26 billion cubic feet of mud; experts estimated that the mud would continue to flow for another 8 to 18 years.

The Lusi mudflow has had severe impact on the region’s economy and public health. According to a 2015 article in Nature Geoscience, the disaster has cost the region more than $2.7 billion. Residents who worked in local factories have lost their jobs, and the rising lake of mud makes rebuilding impossible. The disaster has affected biodiversity in the Porong River, where fish species that cannot adapt to chemicals from the mudflow go extinct, curtailing a food source that locals previously relied upon. Since the eruption, respiratory infection cases in the area have more than doubled; however, as in all natural resource contamination cases, it is difficult to prove the causality of an illness.‍

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Causation Debate and Victim Compensation
The cause of the Lusi mudflow has been hotly debated among scientists, government officials and local residents for over a decade. This debate is fraught, because the outcome will determine who is responsible for covering the cost of both disaster relief infrastructure and compensation for the victims who lost their homes. Many believe that the mudflow was triggered by gas drilling conducted by PT Lapindo Brantas, an oil and gas company that was drilling near the site just before it erupted. Others, including Lapindo, argue that the disaster was caused by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck 150 miles west of the drill site two days earlier. Scientists have published conflicting studies, but as more evidence has emerged in recent years, a majority of scientists have come to support the hypothesis that Lapindo is responsible.

In 2015, an international team of scientists published a study in the journal Nature Geoscience that concluded with 99 percent certainty that Lapindo’s drilling caused the disaster. Just before the explosion, the company’s workers were probing for a new natural gas deposit in Sidoarjo when they hit a rock formation and liquid began to rush up through the drill hole. The engineers sealed the hole, but mud continued to build up underground; eventually the pressure became so great that it burst through the ground 500 feet from the drilling site. The 2015 report includes a new piece of evidence: gas readings that were initially withheld by Lapindo show that a process called liquefaction, which is the mechanism by which an earthquake would have caused the explosion, did not occur. Meanwhile, the data shows that hydrogen sulfide built in the vent in the first days of the eruption, suggesting that the mud came from two miles underground—the same depth reached by the drill. The study’s lead author argued that Lapindo failed to take standard precautions to prevent an accident: “This almost certainly could have been prevented if proper safety procedures had been taken,” Dr. Mark Tingay told the New York Times.

Immediately following the disaster, the Indonesian government refused to assign blame, citing a lack of scientific proof that Lapindo was responsible. The company is owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, a former cabinet minister, billionaire and leader of an influential political party, the Golkar party. The Bakrie family has a net worth of about $5.4 billion, making them one of the wealthiest families in Indonesia. Victims and commentators speculate that political corruption prevented the government from holding Lapindo accountable initially. The local residents led a sustained protest movement, staging demonstrations and filing lawsuits to demand compensation and accountability from Lapindo. For example, on the one-year anniversary of the disaster, activists erected a giant puppet representing Bakrie on the Porong embankment near the mudflow site, defying bans on demonstrations in that area.

In 2007, the Indonesian government ordered Lapindo to provide cash compensation or resettlement to victims who were in a designated “core disaster area.” This ruling caused frustration among many residents, because it relied on a map that many thought did not accurately represent the impact of the mudflow, and because the compensation was unequal. Further, compensation funds were inconsistent: families would receive money for a few months and then the payments would stop. In 2008, Lapindo claimed that it was unable to pay because it faced financial problems due to the global financial crisis. In 2014, newly elected president Joko Widodo, who had campaigned on a promise to help the Lusi victims, ordered his government to loan Lapindo $45.5 million to fund the remaining victim compensation. Lapindo promised to repay the government within four years.

The outstanding compensation payments were completed in October 2015, but some of the mudflow victims continue to organize. Despite the compensation order, Lapindo has not been held legally responsible for the disaster. In 2016, the company announced that it would resume drilling near Sidoarjo in order to pay off its debt to the government. Activists have led a campaign against this new drilling plan, including a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in Jakarta on National Anti-Mining Day in 2019. Many of the Lusi mudflow victims are still struggling to survive and simply want assurance that Lapindo’s drilling will not upend their lives again.