Almost 100 Bodies Pulled From Landslide At Myanmar Jade Mine

“We have issued orders and warned the people not to build makeshift huts near mountains of dump soil and not to stay there”, an unnamed official from the Hpakant Township General Administration Department was cited as saying.

Rescue workers continued to dig through the remnants of the encampment Monday after a landslide over the weekend buried it along with at least 120 people.

Myanmar Red Cross along with local authorities in the landslide-hit area are continuing the rescue operation.It is believed that those killed were rummaging through the mine in search of jade.

Ten MRCS volunteers are helping to retrieve bodies from under the rubble brought down by the landslide, which occurred at 4:00 am Saturday when a mountain of debris from the mines collapsed and buried the tents of a few 200 workers.

“The rescue team there is likely to keep finding more bodies until tonight”, Daw Moe Thida Win said. Two of the bodies recovered were women, he said.

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”. The official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that the accident occurred near a mining site controlled by Triple One Jade Mining at around 3 am.

“Local people in town are getting angry, because there are just too many bodies”, she said.

Workers many of them migrants from elsewhere in Myanmar toil long hours in risky conditions searching for the precious stones.

Many jade mining areas have been turned into a moon-like areas of environmental destruction as huge diggers churn the earth in search of the translucent green stones.

Up to 90 percent of the world’s jadeite is mined in Hpakant-most of which ends up for sale in China.

There was no precise record of how many people were in the area, he said.

In an October report, advocacy group Global Witness estimated that the value of Myanmar jade produced in 2014 alone was $31 billion and said the trade might be “biggest natural resource heist in modern history”.

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which won a national election earlier this month, pledged in its manifesto to bring transparency to the mining industry and make it safe.