HONG KONG — A weeklong, round-the-clock search for victims of a landslide that may have buried dozens of miners in Indonesia is still underway, a rescue official said Tuesday, as the confirmed death toll rose to 17.
The landslide, which struck on Feb. 26 on the island of Sulawesi, left an unknown number of miners trapped underground in makeshift holes. As of Tuesday, rescue personnel combing the steep jungle terrain with earth movers had found 18 survivors, and the death toll had risen from nine a day earlier.
“We have no exact number of the people down there, or even how many small holes there are,” Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, said by telephone.
He added that in addition to 17 dead, the authorities had found body parts that they were working to identify.
They were also searching for the owners of about 50 motorcycles that have been parked near the mining site for days, he said.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster management agency, told reporters in a WhatsApp message on Monday that local estimates of the number of miners working at the site ranged from about 30 to 100.
Mr. Sutopo said pinpointing the number of miners buried by the landslide had been difficult partly because some might have been trapped in smaller offshoots of the site’s primary mining pit.
An estimated one million gold miners work illegally throughout Indonesia, usually using mercury, a hazardous substance, to process their ore. Some miners dig tunnels as deep as 300 feet.
No safety standards are enforced, and mine collapses are not unusual.
Last week, Mr. Sutopo posted photos on Twitter of injured miners in the province of North Sulawesi being passed down a line of men wearing headlamps, and a video of rescuers carrying an orange stretcher through a crowd.
The landslide occurred in the Bolaang Mongondow area of North Sulawesi. Officials there have said the search and rescue effort is scheduled to last until Monday.
After the accident, officials said they could hear voices of some of those trapped inside makeshift mine shafts through gaps in the mud. But Abdul Muin Paputungan, an official overseeing the rescue operation, later told The Associated Press that “signs of life” had faded after four days.
“But we still try to save them even though at the moment it seems like a miracle if they can survive,” he said over the weekend.
Mr. Latif of the search and rescue agency said on Tuesday that rescuers had been unable to hear any trapped miners in recent days, even with radar equipment that can detect noises up to nearly 200 feet underground.
Typically, if someone strikes gold in Indonesia, other miners show up in the area and start digging their own holes nearby. If a landslide covers several holes, the authorities may not know where to search or even how many holes there are.
Officials say the rescue effort in North Sulawesi has been particularly challenging because earlier digging by miners at the site has rendered its steep slopes unstable.
Source : Nytimes
