Disaster Mega-Projects: The Lapindo Mudflow Disaster and Indonesian Environmental-Making State

The paper examines the response of state and corporation to the mudflow crisis that generates an accumulation crisis and challenges the establishment of the Indonesian gas industry. It will explore corporation and state relations in maintaining, preventing and managing the collapse of Porong gas extractive zone. After ten years of conducting a successful operation in Wunut village, Porong, Lapindo Brantas Inc., in 2006, expanded its gas wells to Renokenongo village, Porong, East Java, Indonesia. However, the drilling well operations in the BJP-1 lasted only for eighty days after an underground blowout, triggering a mud spill on May 29th, 2006. As a result, the gas field turned into a disaster producing mudflow to the earth’s surface. The mud from the drilling well spread fast and threatened the establishment of the gas industry and East Java’s regional economy. The paper asks "what is at stake concerning the gas industry and East Java regional economy? How the corporation and state reassembled the ruinous environment?" Parenti recognizes the state as an environmental entity, ensuring capital’s access to nature as the provider of raw materials (2016, 167). The environmental-making state for Parenti has geopower, a “statecraft and technologies of power that make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable” (Parenti 2016, 171). The mudflow disaster demonstrates that the state, through the disaster management agency, reassembles the disastrous environment through a series of environment-making activities by developing what I call a "disaster mega-project". In mudflow disaster context, disaster mega-project developed as part of the solution in disaster management through the development of various infrastructures such as mud embankments, mudflow drainage, and toll road relocation.