BEIJING: More than 80 workers were buried when a huge landslide came crashing down a mountainside in Tibet yesterday, Chinese state-run media said.
A vast three-kilometre-long section of land, with a volume of two million cubic metres, slid down a slope and buried 83 miners in Maizhokunggar county, east of the Tibetan capital Lhasa, the official Xinhua news agency said.
A total of 1,000 police personnel, firefighters and doctors were sent to the disaster site, at an altitude of 4,600 metres, the agency said, with 200 vehicles and 15 dogs, and sets of life-detecting equipment.
State broadcaster CCTV quoted a member of the Chinese People’s Armed Police on the scene as saying that “the situation looks serious, the collapsed area is three or four square kilometres”.
Rescuers have so-far found no signs of the trapped workers, the cop added. The workers were from China National Gold Group Corporation, a mining firm. Almost all of them were Han Chinese, the national ethnic majority, with only two of them ethnic Tibetans, Xinhua added. Most were migrant workers from the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.
China’s new president Xi Jinping, who is currently visiting the Republic of Congo in Africa, and new premier Li Keqiang had ordered “top efforts” to rescue the victims, Xinhua added. “Xi and Li have told local authorities to spare no efforts to rescue the buried and prevent secondary disasters,” it said. A worker at a hospital in the county reached by AFP late yesterday said it had not yet received any casualties but staff were “making preparations”. AFP
