20 Nicaraguan miners rescued, 5 still missing two days after collapse
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 30 August, 2014, 7:03pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 30 August, 2014, 7:03pm
Agence France-Presse in Managua
A miner covered in m&d emerges from the gold mine after being trapped there for nearly two days after a landslide in Bonanza town. Photo: Reuters
Twenty miners who had been trapped deep underground for nearly two days after a cave-in at an unlicensed gold mine have been rescued in Nicaragua, but five more workers were still missing.
There had been 28 informal gold miners working in the shaft when the mouth of the mine caved in because of a landslide triggered by heavy downpours early Thursday morning.
Two workers buried near the surface had earlier managed to dig their way out after the collapse in the remote village of El Comal in northeastern Nicaragua, according to the local disaster prevention committee.
The rescued miners were pulled out one at a time using a pulley system installed late on Friday near the pit where they had been trapped.
Most younger than 30, they were “pretty tired, exhausted, dehydrated, muddy and dirty,” an AFP photographer on the scene said.
WATCH: A news report of the Nicaraguan miners' rescue
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The miners were immediately embraced by family members, who had stayed nearby since the accident, and then taken to the nearest hospital.
The accident happened at an artisanal mine near the town of Bonanza, which is perched on the side of a hill, in a region that is home to Nicaragua’s biggest gold mines.
Desperate relatives initially tried to dig through to the trapped miners before being stymied by the unstable terrain, news reports said.
Authorities had said earlier they were trying to confirm whether any miners had died, noting that the incident happened in a hard-to-reach area with poor communication.
A local TV station showed what appeared to be the body of a dead miner being recovered.
“We give thanks to God our Lord and the Virgin Mary for having saved from death 20 artisanal miners,” first lady Rosario Murillo, the presidential spokeswoman, told reporters. Murillo said five miners had “not surfaced” and rescue crews were still working to locate them.
Business has boomed over the past decade for Nicaragua’s informal miners as the price of gold has risen from less than US$400 an ounce to more than US$1,200.
They descend into old shafts that have been abandoned by conventional mining companies and look for remaining gold or dig even deeper to find new veins. The work can be perilous.
Still, informal gold mining is the main source of employment in Bonanza, where officials estimate there are 6,000 such miners. Many of them have migrated there from other parts of the country in a modern-day gold rush.
The latest accident comes four years after 33 workers were trapped deep inside Chile’s San Jose copper and gold mine for more than two months, a drama that captured worldwide attention.
It took rescuers 17 days to drill a small shaft to establish contact, and more than two months of painstaking effort to open a passage wide enough to pull them out one by one.
