PH
Baptist deacon Dut La, who is organizing funerals for the victims, said on Wednesday that six bodies were in the morgue but more than a dozen may be unrecovered from the accident in Kachin state’s Hpakant mining region.
Hpakant, 950km northeast of Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon, is the epicenter of the lucrative jade mining industry. Jade is mined with heavy equipment that leaves small pieces in the waste soil that is piled into huge mounds.
The accidents usually involve people who settle near the mounds to scavenge through the precariously high pile.
