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28 March 2024

25 dead, about 100 missing in Philippine landslide

Published
By AFP

At least 25 people were killed and about 100 others were missing in the southern Philippines on Thursday after a landslide struck a community of gold prospectors, officials said.

The landslip hit a remote mountain community of about 100 families near Pantukan town on Mindanao island at dawn, civil defence chief Benito Ramos told AFP.

"A military unit is in the area but they are basically digging with their hands," he told AFP.

The provincial government and local mining firms have been asked to bring up heavy equipment to the village, called Napnapan, to help the local army battalion speed up the rescue, Ramos added.

The rains were unleashed by a baby storm off Mindanao's southeast coast that later dissipated, the state weather service said.

Pantukan and nearby Monkayo town have drawn thousands of gold prospectors for years, and the largely unregulated mining activities have made the mountainside unstable and caused a series of deadly accidents.

Fourteen people were killed in a landslide on a nearby section of a mountainside on April 22 last year on top of another landslide in 2009 that killed 26 people.

Acting on the advice of national government geologists, local officials ordered all Pantukan gold rush areas evacuated last year after the April landslide.

However, they said some people had returned, possibly joined by new migrants drawn by stratospheric gold prices.

"These are small-scale miners who tunnel into the side of the mountains like rats," Ramos said.

Twenty-five bodies were pulled from the debris within the first six hours, said Chief Superintendent Jaime Morente, the regional police chief.

Arturo Uy, the governor of Compostela Valley province that includes Pantukan, said more than 100 people are believed to be still buried under the collapsed mountainside.

Ramos however said the number of missing was an estimate based on figures from village officials.

Miners had been warned previously of the danger of landslides after one struck a nearby community of gold prospectors in April, said Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Ramon Paje.

"We have identified this area as highly susceptible to landslides," he told ABS-CBN television in an interview.

"We had already told them even before the April incident happened that the top of the ridge is cracked, and it was just a matter of time" before another struck, Paje added.

"We had already ordered them out of the area in April and many did leave," Uy told GMA television in a telephone interview.

"But the area is remote and the local government has difficulty monitoring the area."

Ramos said two military helicopters were airlifting more rescuers to Pantukan from the southern port of Cagayan de Oro, one of two Mindanao cities hit hard by flash floods last month that killed more than 1,200 people.