THE landslide at the Leuwigajah dumpsite in Cimahi, West Java, on Monday last week was not caused by a geological factor. “It was caused more by man,” says Gatot M. Soedradjat, head of the Earth Movement Section at the Directorate of Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation.

Leuwigajah operates as an open dumpsite where the garbage is simply left to pile up, growing over time into a mountain 50 meters and producing methane gas.