Hundreds more missing after wave of mud buries many people alive
More than 160 people have been buried alive after a wave of mud swept through a jade mine in northern Myanmar, in one of the worst disasters to hit the notoriously dangerous industry.
Workers had been collecting stones in the mountainous terrain of Hpakant township when they were trapped by the landslide on Thursday morning.
A slice of mountain collapsed, sending a churning torrent of mud into an aquamarine-coloured lake of mine waste water as workers fled uphill.
Dozens “were smothered by a wave of mud”, the Myanmar fire services department said in a Facebook post.
Rescue workers, including the fire department and local police, worked throughout the day to pull bodies out of a mud lake under a continuous deluge of heavy monsoon rain.
Images from the scene showed teams wading through a flooded valley, searching for missing workers. So far, at least 54 injured people have been sent to three hospitals, according to local authorities.
“There are so many people floating in the water,” a bystander told AFP.
Bodies of miners were laid out in rows under tarpaulins, some missing shoes as a result of the force of the wall of mud that hit them.
A woman grieved over the recovered victims, as rescue workers held her up.
Working through the rain was a challenge, police superintendent Than Win Aung said, as it could spark another mine collapse on the unstable terrain.
“We can’t dig and find the bodies buried underwater,” he told AFP, adding that rescue efforts would be further hampered as night fell.
Conditions are treacherous for the low-paid migrant workers who toil in Myanmar’s jade mines, particularly during monsoon season. Last year 54 miners were engulfed by a muddy lake that breached its banks near to a mine in Hpakant. People from impoverished ethnic communities, who search for scraps left behind by big firms, are often the victims of such disasters.
The government has previously pledged to clean up the lucrative jade business, but it remains poorly regulated. Equipment failures and other accidents are common in the industry, which is controlled by the military elite and private conglomerates.
Hpakant is in Kachin state, home to the world’s largest and most valuable jade deposits, but little of the profits trickles down into the country. In 2014 a report by Global Witness put the value of jade production in Myanmar at about $31bn, nearly half of Myanmar’s GDP that year. The vast majority is smuggled to China, where jade is highly sought-after and associated with royalty, bypassing tax authorities.
Northern Myanmar’s abundant natural resources – including jade, timber, gold and amber – help finance both sides of a decades-long civil war between ethnic Kachin insurgents and the military. The fight to control the mines and the revenues they bring frequently traps local civilians in the middle.