First body found after landslide in Tibet buries 83

USPA News - Chinese rescue workers have recovered the first body after a massive landslide buried more than 80 workers at a polymetal mining site in Tibet, state-run media reported on Saturday, as authorities expressed little hope of finding anyone alive. The accident happened at 6 a.m. local time on Friday when the landslide hit a workers` camp belonging to the Jiama Copper Polymetallic Mine in Maizhokunggar County, located about 68 kilometers (42 miles) east of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

The landslide, with some 2 million cubic meters (2.6 million cubic yards) of mud, rock and debris, covered an area approximately 3 kilometers (1.86 mile) long. Rescue workers recovered the first body at 5:35 p.m. local time on Saturday, nearly 36 hours after the landslide buried 83 mine workers at the camp. Search-and-rescue operations were continuing overnight, but authorities in the region expressed little hope of finding any survivors. "The rescuers are conducting an inch-by-inch search but they still cannot locate the missing miners," Wu Yingjie, deputy secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China, told the state-run Xinhua news agency. He said the chances of survival for the miners is slim due to the scale of the landslide. More than 3,500 rescue workers and 300 large-scale machineries were working at the site by late Saturday evening, but snowfall during the day was hampering rescue efforts. Many of the rescue workers were using their bare hands in their efforts to find the missing mine workers. "The on-site rescue work which is being carried out is intense but orderly," said Liu Sen of the State Administration of Work Safety. The Ministry of Civil Affairs said two of the buried workers are local Tibetans and others are from neighboring provinces such as Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.