Three people were killed and dozens were missing after a night-time landslide ravaged a small gold mining town in a mountainous area of the Philippines yesterday, authorities said.
The landslide hit at about 3am, ripping through shanty homes while miners and their families were sleeping and destroying poorly constructed tunnels where the unregistered workers extract gold using hand tools.
Three bodies had been recovered by early yesterday afternoon, while 10 people had been pulled from the debris alive, said Susan Madrid, duty officer of the region’s National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council.
“The number of dead will probably go up,” she said.
The spokesman of the military unit that rushed to the site, Lieutenant-Colonel Camilo Ligayo, said residents had told him at least 40 people were missing, feared buried in the tunnels and their homes.
“There are 40 still missing and that is a conservative estimate. The one who gave the estimate was one of the survivors from the tunnels. They know each other there,” Ligayo said. “The landslide is massive and these people, the small-scale miners, they work and live on the slopes. They have bunkers, houses, stores.”
The landslide occurred in the isolated town of Kingking in a mountainous area of the resource-rich, but poor and violence-plagued southern island of Mindanao.
The local military commander, Colonel Roberto Domines, said an accurate count of the people hit by the landslide was difficult because many people had entered the area unofficially to dig for gold.
“Even the town government cannot give an accurate estimate because these are small-scale miners. They aren’t from the town. These people come from all over the region,” Domines said.
Madrid said rescue efforts had been hampered because the landslide had blocked road travel to the area.
“The route to the area is impassable, but we have heavy equipment that is already clearing the area,” she said.
However soldiers and civil defense teams had quickly reached Kingking by helicopter. The military had also deployed a bulldozer, a dump truck and heavy-lifting machinery, while a US mining company that had been carrying out exploration work in the region also sent equipment, Madrid said.
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