The landslide happened in the early hours of Saturday in Hpakant, an area that produces a few of the world’s highest-quality jade, but the mines and dump sites for debris are rife with hazards and landslides are not uncommon, though rarely this deadly.
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It is unclear what triggered the landslide in the mountainous region.
The corpses were taken to a nearby morgue, where friends and relatives broke down as they identified the victims.
It generated an estimated $31 billion previous year alone, most of the wealth going to individuals and companies tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, according to Global Witness, a group that investigates misuse of resource revenues.
“As of Sunday evening at 6 pm, the total number [of deaths] reached to 104, as 26 more bodies were found on Sunday and 78 bodies were found on Saturday”, the incoming National League for Democracy (NLD) lawmaker said, adding that most of the bodies recovered were men, with about three being women.
As of 4 p.m. local time (4.30 a.m. EST) on Sunday, 97 bodies had been pulled from the landslide, said Tin Swe Myint, head of the Hpakant Township Administration Department.
Hpakant, the epicenter of the country’s jade boom, remains desperately poor.
It was known locally as Plastic Village, a sprawling encampment made from tarps and scraps of trash and inhabited by workers who scavenged for jade in the rugged hills of northern Burma.
Authorities said others and this site had formerly been designated at risk of notices and landslides were issued to small scale miners not to dwell there, said state- The Global New Light of Myanmar.
Many people remain missing and efforts to retrieve more bodies are being hindered due to the depth of the landslide and the dangers involved in recovery efforts.
“Local people in town are getting angry, because there are just too many bodies”, she said.
Locals have launched desperate campaigns to try to persuade Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government, which replaced outright military rule in 2015, to force mining firms to curtail their rapidly expanding operations.
Authorities had said earlier that the dead were miners picking through the waste and tailings for a piece of jade to sell.
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Many jade mining areas have been turned into a moon-like areas of environmental destruction as huge diggers churn the earth in search of the translucent green stones.
