T

he landslide that buried dozens of people in Sampang village, Karangkobar district in Banjarnegara regency, Central Java, on Friday evening should give us a reason to mourn, not only because of the human losses but also '€” and primarily '€” due to the fact that we could have prevented fatalities.

As of Sunday, 39 bodies had been unearthed from the thick mud while 69 others remained unaccounted for. President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo, who visited survivors of the disaster, ordered the search-and-rescue team to focus on finding the missing people and evacuating hundreds of displaced people.

The presence of Jokowi, as well as other top officials including ministers and the Central Java governor, as a token of the state'€™s attention to victims of the disaster, may have given support to the survivors. But in the case of Banjarnegara, the state had been practically absent before the catastrophe struck and claimed lives.

A seasoned geologist from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Edi Prasetyo Utomo, was quoted by Kompas daily as saying that he had recommended the state'€™s protection of local people in Banjarnegara following his study of a previous landslide in 2006 in a village situated close to Sampang. To his surprise and regret, nothing had changed in the way the state treated the citizens most at risk of landslides until another disaster recurred.

A field check confirmed Edi'€™s apprehension as Sampang village chief Partono admitted to never having seen the local government provide training on evacuation in the event of a landslide. Due to a lack of information, many people in the disaster-prone area built houses from brick, which are technically more susceptible to landslides than wooden houses.

Another scholar, T. Faisal Fathani of Gadjah Mada University'€™s School of Civil Engineering, said he and his colleagues had ranked Karangkobar at the top of the list of landslide-vulnerable districts in Banjarnegara in 2007. The team proposed a landslide early-warning device, but to no avail.

An early-warning system was installed in the neighboring district of Pagentan and it did save lives when a landslide occurred at the end of last year. The siren worked well to prompt local residents to flee just before the mudslide swept away their homes.

The scientists have proven landslides are detectable, even avoidable.

Blaming the slow response to the scientific findings on the part of the previous government does not mean anything. It would be better for the Jokowi administration to learn from the Banjarnegara landslide as there are many areas in the regency and other parts of the country at risk of such a disaster now that the rainy season has come.

The National Disaster Mitigation Agency has identified West Java and West Sumatra as two other provinces where landslides may strike any time. Both the central and local governments have to move fast to prevent more casualties.

Without precautionary measures, we will only let more disasters slide by.