Death toll rises to 17 after mine collapse, as rescue teams look for remaining missing workers buried under rubble.

Eight people remain trapped in a rock collapse at a quarry in West Java, where the death toll has reached 17, with a further six workers injured.

Up to eight people remain missing in the Gunung Kuda quarry in the Cirebon district of West Java, after the mine collapsed on Friday.

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry will investigate the cause of the collapse and conduct an assessment to identify any potential further landslides, it said in a statement.

Cirebon Regency is prone to soil movement, especially when precipitation is above normal, while the area of the collapse has a cliff slope, the chief of the ministry’s geological agency, Muhammad Wafid, said in another statement.

Wafid said the undercutting method used in the open mining area and the steep slope may also have played a role in the collapse.

“While carrying out evacuation and search efforts, (rescuers) must pay attention to the weather and steep slopes, and not carry out activities during and after heavy rain, because this area still has the potential for further landslides that could hit or bury officers,” Wafid said.

On Saturday, police with soldiers, emergency rescue teams, and volunteers were frantically digging into the steep limestone cliff, supported by five excavators, according to reports from local TV stations.

Ten bodies were quickly recovered on Friday afternoon, with another three bodies pulled from the rubble later that night, and a badly injured worker who later succumbed to their injuries in hospital, the National Search and Rescue Agency in a statement.

The cause of the collapse is still under investigation, and police are questioning six people including the owner of the quarry, local police chief Sumarni said, who uses a single name.

West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi said in a video statement on Instagram that he visited the quarry before he was elected in February and considered it dangerous.

“It did not meet the safety standard elements for its workers,” Mulyadi said.

He added that he “didn’t have any capacity to stop it” at the time.

Mulyadi said on Friday that he had ordered the quarry closed, as well as four other similar sites in West Java.

Illegal or informal resource extraction operations are common in Indonesia, providing a tenuous livelihood to those who labour in conditions with a high risk of injury or death.

Landslides, flooding and tunnel collapses are just some of the hazards associated with them.

Much of the processing of sand, rocks or gold ore also involves the use of highly toxic mercury and cyanide by workers using little or no protection.

In 2024, a landslide triggered by torrential rains struck an unauthorised gold mining operation on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, killing at least 15 people.

Hundreds of mine sites linked to disaster areas

It is unclear at this stage what caused the mine site landslide on Friday.

But the local ASEAN Disaster Information Network reported several flooding and landslide incidents in the Cirebon district of West Java due to high coastal tides and prolonged heavy rainfall impacting the stability of soil in the weeks before the mine collapsed.

While skies have remained dry during rescue and recovery efforts so far, rainfall is also being considered by Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, BNPB.

“It is hoped that in this search operation, safety will be prioritised and attention to the surrounding natural conditions. If it rains for more than an hour, it is advisable to carry out independent evacuation to a safer place for a while,” BNPB said in a statement.

Many mines in Indonesia operate on or nearby disaster-prone areas.

Of the thousands of mining business permits approved in Indonesia, 783 were connected to disaster-prone areas, according to reports in 2020 from the local Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam).

Throughout 2019, the Network recorded seven major mining-related disasters, which killed 35 people and affected 83,722 residents.

At that time, a spokesperson for Jatam raised concerns about a number of existing mines near old disaster zones, including a mine operating in East Java, near Mount Tumpang Pitu in Banyuwangi, where a tsunami hit in 1994.

Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, BNPB, acknowledged at the time that it had not yet created a map which integrated mine permits with data relating to disaster-prone areas, but noted one was in the works.

7NEWS.com.au has contacted BNPB for further comment.

- With AP and CNN