Hopes Fade for 100 Miners Missing after Landslide in Myanmar
24 November 2015 12:06 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Yangon - Hopes faded on Monday, November 23, that any of an estimated 100 people missing would be found alive after a landslide in northern Myanmar buried an encampment near a jade mine, and officials said it was still unclear how many people were living in the area.
Rescue workers had recovered 113 bodies when the search was suspended on Monday evening, Htin Kyaw, a local police officer, told Reuters. Two of the bodies recovered were women, he said.
Heavy equipment has been brought in to assist the digging in Hpakant, the site of the landslide in a mountainous area in the northern Kachin State that produces some of the world's highest-quality jade.
"We just don't know how many people exactly were buried since we don't have any data on people living there," Tin Swe Myint, head of the Hpakant Township Administration Department, said on Sunday.
"It was just a slum with these workers living in makeshift tents."
A man-made mountain of earth excavated from mines gave way in the early hours of Saturday, smashing into a makeshift settlement at the foot of the slag heap and burying mine workers as they slept.
The mines and soil dump sites are hazardous and deaths among the many migrant workers who pick through the slag piles for jade are common.
An official from the Myanmar Gems Enterprise, a division of the Ministry of Mines that oversees the mining and sales of jade and other gems, said that landslides at dump sites were "very common."
Ko Sai, a miner who was at a nearby camp, said the landslide hit around 3 a.m., when many miners were sleeping.
"We just heard a loud noise sounding like thunder and saw that the huge mountain collapsed and a huge wave of rubble was moving and sprawling on a wide area," Ko Sai said.
"It was just like a nightmare," he said.
REUTERS
