Death toll rises as searchers pull bodies from rubble after Myanmar landslide

Soldiers and rescue workers carry the body of a dead miner killed by landslide at Hpakant jade mining area, Kachin State, northern Myanmar as the death toll rose to more than 100 with another 100 stilShow more

YANGON // Hopes faded on Monday that any of 100 people still missing would be found alive two days after a landslide near a jade mine in northern Myanmar smashed into a makeshift settlement, burying mine workers as they slept.

Soldiers, police and volunteers pulled body after body from the rubble on Monday, as the death toll reached at least 113, a local official said.

The collapse early Saturday in Kachin state’s mining community of Hpakant was the worst-such disaster in recent memory. It is unclear what caused a mountain of mining debris to give way in the area in northern Kachin State.

Corpses were taken to a nearby morgue, where friends and relatives broke down as they identified the victims. Some were buried at a local cemetery and others were cremated. But there were stacks of unidentified bodies wrapped in blue plastic tarps.

Kachin is home to some of the world’s highest-quality jade, and the industry generated an estimated $31 billion last year, with most of the wealth going to individuals and companies tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, according to Global Witness, a group that investigates misuse of resource revenues.

But it remains desperately poor, with bumpy dirt roads, constant electricity blackouts and sky-high heroin addiction rates.

The accident occurred at a 60-metre high mountain of earth and waste discarded by several mines.

Earlier, officials said the dead were mostly men who were picking through the waste and tailings in search of pieces of jade to sell. But officials on Monday said the accident occurred at about 3am, burying more than 70 makeshift huts where the miners slept.

Ko Sai, a miner who was at a nearby camp, said: “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.”

“It was just like a nightmare,” he said.

Nilar Myint, a local township administrator, said that by Monday the death toll had reached 113, with more than 100 others missing.

Bodies continued to be pulled from the debris on Monday.

“It’s not ending. It’s still on going. Local people in town are getting angry, because there are just too many bodies,” she said.

After Myanmar’s former military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government five years ago, resulting in the lifting of many western sanctions, the already rapid pace of mining turned frenetic. No scrap of ground, no part of daily life in Hpakant has been left untouched by the fleets of giant yellow trucks and backhoes that have sliced apart mountains and denuded once-plush landscape.

In the last year, dozens of small-scale miners have been maimed or killed picking through tailing dumps.

* Reuters and Associated Press