# They Were Going to Work in the Forest. Twenty-One Never Came Home.
On the morning of July 7, 2026, 33 forestry workers were walking through Baxiangou near Rencang Village, Tanchang County, Gansu Province.
They were employees of the Minjiang Forestry General Farm, heading deeper into the mountains to clear and tend the forest.
At about 6:56 a.m., a landslide came down across their route.
By the time the search ended early the next morning, 21 workers were dead. Seven were injured and five escaped without injury. At a July 8 government briefing, officials said the seven injured workers were in stable condition.
The workers came from Rencang, Gaoqiao and Rushu villages nearby. This was not a group of tourists caught on an unfamiliar mountain. They were going to work.
That distinction matters.
The landslide occurred in a steep, uninhabited area between Shangzhuang and Dala. Officials described it as a shallow soil landslide about 130 meters long, covering roughly 5,400 square meters, with an estimated volume of about 10,000 cubic meters.
To most people, that place was simply an empty mountainside.
To these workers, it was the road to their job.
That leaves a question that should not disappear with the rescue operation:
**Who decides when a work route through the mountains is safe enough for 33 people to enter?**
A landslide cannot always be predicted at an exact place and minute. But organized work still requires someone to look at weather, terrain, recent slope conditions and geological risk — and someone with the authority to stop the work when necessary.
This is not merely hindsight.
Ten days after the disaster, four national agencies issued an emergency notice on geological-hazard prevention. Referring to the recent deadly landslides in Tanchang and Chongqing, the notice said the incidents exposed shortcomings including incomplete routine hazard inspections and failures to identify and assess warning signs in time. Authorities ordered broader inspections, stronger monitoring and earlier evacuation when danger is detected.
That is an important part of what these 21 deaths left behind.
The issue is not whether human beings can control a mountain.
They cannot.
The issue is whether people whose jobs take them into dangerous terrain are being protected as seriously as the work itself is organized.
Were known hazards along the route checked?
Were conditions assessed that morning?
Was there a threshold for cancelling or delaying the work?
Who had the authority to say, “Do not go in today”?
Those questions need factual answers.
Officials said after the disaster that a natural-disaster investigation and assessment would be carried out, along with wider inspections of geological hazards in Longnan.
As of August 11, I have not found a publicly released final investigation or assessment giving a definitive account of the landslide’s trigger or determining whether specific failures contributed to the deaths.
So it would be wrong to invent responsibility before that evidence exists.
But it would be equally wrong to remember this only as “21 people killed by a sudden landslide.”
They were workers.
At six in the morning, they were walking toward a job site.
A little later, the road they used for work became the place where most of them died.
Twenty-one people did not come home.
That deserves more than condolences. It deserves an explanation of what happened, what could realistically have been prevented, and what will change before another group of workers is sent into similar terrain.
May the dead rest in peace.
May the injured recover.
And may the next group of workers who enters these mountains have someone, somewhere, with both the information and the authority to say:
**Today, this road is not safe.**