ZAMBOANGA CITY, 28 October 2005 — At least 18 miners were killed and dozens more were missing after an explosion inside a gold mine in the southern province of Compostela Valley, officials said yesterday.
Only 10 miners have been rescued so far in the blast late on Wednesday, Jesus Dureza, the presidential assistant for Mindanao affairs, told Arab News yesterday.
Dureza said the mine is operated by JB Management and Mining Corp. in the mountain village of Mount Diwata.
“There was an explosion inside the cave and the tunnel gave in, trapping everybody,” said Dureza, who is supervising the rescue operations.
He said heavy rains were making it difficult for rescuers to dig for bodies or find survivors.
Village chieftain Franco Tito said as many as 50 miners were still trapped inside the tunnel.
He quoted one survivor as saying a cache of dynamite ignited inside the tunnel around 10:20 p.m. Wednesday.
But the civil defense regional office later said it was a compressor supplying air and ventilation inside the tunnel that had exploded and dismissed the dynamite explanation as rumor.
Tito said mine officials refused to let local villagers and even police and soldiers go inside the mine compound to help with the rescue. He said they counted 18 bodies brought out by vehicles from the compound.
Provincial police chief Senior Superintendent Nestor Quinsay, however, said police and soldiers were later allowed inside the area to help in the rescue effort.
He said more rescuers from the regional disaster agency plus extra troops and police were on their way to the site and expected to reach the area early Friday.
But Tito held out little hope of finding more survivors among about 50 people believed to have been inside the tunnel “because this is an explosion, not a tunnel collapse.”
“This is going to be a retrieval, no longer a rescue operation,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.
No one at JB Management and Mining Corp. was available to comment.
Accidents are common in the mining areas on the gold rush site also known as Mount Diwalwal, which is believe to sit atop a rich gold deposit, about 930 kilometers southeast of Manila.
Tens of thousands of villagers continue to dig tunnels despite warnings from the authorities that the place has become dangerous because of repeated landslides.
Officials said that estimated $18 billion worth of gold reserves remain untapped in the 5,000-hectare mountain complex. (With input from agencies)
