A landslide in coal waste covering about a square kilometre was triggered by heavy rainfall.
At about 4 am on 4 November 2025, a very large landslide occurred in a coal waste pile at the Mae Moh Mine in Thailand. This is an extremely large coal mining site that is co-located with electricity generating plants.
The landslide itself is very large. EGAT, the owner of the powerplant at the site, has released this image of the aftermath of the failure:-
It appears that the landslide occurred in Mae Moh 8 Project area, and that it damaged the offices of Sahakol Equipment Co. Ltd. Google Maps places both of these elements in the area of [18.34735, 99.70067], but the precise location of the landslide is unclear. We will need to wait for a cloud-free day to pin this down more precisely.
News reports indicate that movement was first detected on about 31 October 2025, and that heavy rainfall over the following days led to the failure. The main body of the landslide appears to be mainly translational, although there may be a rotational component in the head scarp area. Displacement near to the crown appears to be several tens of metres at least.
The lowest portions of the landslide have a flow type of mechanism. There may be some pipes on the slope on the right side of the image – it would be interesting to know if these have fed water into the slope.
“EGAT has declared a state of emergency in the area and has cordoned off the area for safety reasons, forcing the company to temporarily halt work on the Mae Moh 8 project. From a preliminary investigation, the company’s damaged assets include some office buildings and maintenance facilities, some of the Mae Moh 8 project’s soil conveyor belt structures, and other operating machinery.”
This is not the first such failure at Mae Moh mine. In a paper in the journal Engineering Geology, Hoy et al. (2024) describe a 1.2 km long waste dump failure on 18 March 2018. The landslide looks to have been remarkably similar to the event this week.
Reference
Hoy, M. et al. 2024. Investigation of a large-scale waste dump failure at the Mae Moh mine in Thailand. Engineering Geology, 329, 107400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2023.107400