Lapindo mud flow (Sidoarjo, Indonesia)

In 2006 hot mud began to flow beside a gas well drilled by Lapindo Brantas in Sidoarjo, East Java. The mud swallowed twelve villages and was still flowing in the twentieth year. Lapindo Brantas belonged to the Bakrie family. Aburizal Bakrie was at the time Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare and later became chair of the Golkar party.

On 22 November 2006 a gas pipeline under the dike holding back the mud exploded. Thirteen people died, most of them soldiers sent to reinforce the dike. The sources reviewed record no crime name for the deaths and no prosecution for them.

The company's first account was that the Yogyakarta earthquake two days earlier had triggered the eruption. In 2007 the State Audit Agency (BPK) counted many rule violations in the drilling. In 2008 the government declared the event a natural disaster. In April 2009 the Supreme Court again called it a natural disaster and saw no compensation liability. In August 2009 police closed the file on 13 suspects, including a director general, for insufficient evidence. The cause, drilling or earthquake, remains a matter of scientific debate in the sources reviewed.

Four months after the eruption, Lapindo was sold for $2 to a Jersey-registered company owned by the Bakrie family. A government decree divided the affected area: Lapindo was to pay inside the core area and the state outside it. When Lapindo could not complete its payments, the Finance Ministry opened a loan to the company in 2015 of 773 billion rupiah, and victims were paid from it. By 2019 the company had repaid 5 billion rupiah. The State Audit Agency's claim was put at 1.91 trillion rupiah, and the company proposed to settle the rest with physical assets.

Television channels owned by the Bakrie family, TVOne and ANTV, called the event the 'Sidoarjo mud' rather than the Lapindo mud. Research from ISEAS (2022) and a statement from Universitas Gadjah Mada describe this naming as a framing that moved the company's name out of the coverage.