Scores dead in landslide at Myanmar jade mine
HPAKANT, Myanmar — At least 162 people were killed Thursday in a landslide at a jade mine, the worst in a series of deadly accidents at such sites in recent years that critics blame on the government’s failure to take action against unsafe conditions.
The Myanmar Fire Service Department, which coordinates rescues and other emergency services, announced about 12 hours after the morning disaster that 162 bodies had been recovered from the landslide in Hpakant, the center of the world’s biggest and most lucrative jade mining industry.
“The jade miners were smothered by a wave of mud,” the Fire Service said.
It said 54 injured people were taken to hospitals. The tolls announced by other state agencies and media lagged behind the fire agency, which was most closely involved. An unknown number of people are feared missing.
At the site of the tragedy, a crowd gathered in the rain around corpses shrouded in blue and red plastic sheets placed in a row on the ground.
Emergency workers had to slog through heavy mud to retrieve bodies by wrapping them in the plastic sheets, which were then hung on crossed wooden poles shouldered by the recovery teams.
The London-based environmental watchdog Global Witness said the accident “is a damning indictment of the government”s failure to curb reckless and irresponsible mining practices in Kachin state’s jade mines.”
The most detailed estimate of Myanmar’s jade industry said it generated about $31 billion in 2014.
Hpakant is a rough and remote area in Kachin state, 600 miles north of Myanmar’s capital and biggest city, Yangon.
Social activists have complained the profitability of jade mining has led businesses and the government to neglect enforcement of already very weak regulations in the jade mining industry.
“The government should immediately suspend large-scale, illegal and dangerous mining in Hpakant and ensure companies that engage in these practices are no longer able to operate,” Global Witness said in a statement.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed deep sadness at the deaths, sending condolences to families of the victims and Myanmar’s government and people.
Gutteres reiterated “the readiness of the United Nations to contribute to ongoing efforts to address the needs of the affected population,” said his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.
Thursday’s death toll surpasses that of a November 2015 accident that left 113 dead and had been considered the country’s worst. In that case, the victims died when a 200-foot-high mountain of earth and waste discarded by several mines tumbled in the middle of the night, covering more than 70 huts where miners slept.
Global Witness said in a 2015 report that most of the wealth from jade mining goes to individuals and companies tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, and that locals are left with “a dystopian wasteland in which scores of people at a time are buried alive in landslides.”