Kaokalam sits in Maip Mulitaka, a remote corner of Enga Province high in the central cordillera of Papua New Guinea. The country straddles one of the most geologically restless junctions on Earth, where the Australian and Pacific plates grind against each other, and its highland ridges are steep, saturated, and fractured. On the night of the collapse, a magnitude 4.5 tremor was recorded west-northwest of Porgera. Whether it was the final trigger or simply one more stress on ground that had been drenched by months of heavy rain, the result was catastrophic. When the slope let go, it carried farmland, houses, a stretch of the Highlands Highway, and the stream beds that had carved the valley into a single churning mass.

Only helicopters could reach Kaokalam in those first days. Roads were gone or blocked by secondary slides, and the debris itself was still alive - shifting underfoot, with three buried streams pooling beneath it and saturating the ground further. Local villagers were the first responders, clawing at the rubble with shovels and bare hands while they waited. Police, medics, engineers, and United Nations staff arrived in tandem with the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, brought in at the order of Prime Minister James Marape. By dusk on the first day, a single mechanical digger was working the edge of a pile that stretched for hundreds of metres. Authorities warned that nearly 7,900 people living nearby were at risk from further collapses.

On 26 May, Papua New Guinea made a formal request for international assistance. The response came fast and from many directions. Australia pledged up to AU$4.5 million and sent a disaster response team alongside the Australian Defence Force and Queensland Fire and Emergency Services. New Zealand committed NZ$1.5 million and a Defence Force C-130. India promised US$1 million, Japan contributed through UNICEF, and the European Union released 150,000 euros. USAID added two million kina. The Chinese embassy dispatched a medical team directly to Mulitaka. The Catholic Diocese of Wabag organised its own relief, and the provincial governments of Hela and Southern Highlands pledged a million kina each. Even mining firms operating in the region - ICTSI South Pacific and Newmont - matched that figure.

Getting help to the site meant more than negotiating landslides. Humanitarian convoys leaving the provincial capital of Wabag had to pass through Tambitanis, where intertribal clashes had killed eight people and burned 35 homes and businesses earlier that year. The Defence Force escorted the trucks. Enga had been on edge for months: in February 2024, sixty-nine people had died in a massacre at Akom, which Prime Minister Marape described as an act of domestic terrorism and the country's worst single loss of life since the Bougainville conflict. The landslide fell on communities already displaced and already mourning. CARE estimated that 4,000 people needed humanitarian aid - a count that included families driven from their villages by the earlier violence.

On 31 May, Marape flew to the site, stood on the unstable debris, and pledged twenty million kina toward reconstruction. Parliament held a minute of silence. Condolences arrived from Governor-General Bob Dadae and from King Charles III. Then, on 5 June, the military announced that all recovery of bodies would halt. The ground was still moving. Fresh fractures had opened above the debris field. Continuing to dig risked sending rescuers after those they could not save. Access to the site was restricted; the mountain had become a tomb. The few survivors - many already grieving family lost in the February violence - were left with the harder, longer work of rebuilding in a place where the land itself could no longer be trusted.