In this photo released by the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS), rescuers prepare to head out to the site of a landslide that killed a number of people, in Suwawa on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia on July 8, 2024. Photo: BASARNAS via AP

Rescue workers searched for dozens of missing people on July 9, digging through tons of mud and the rubble left by a landslide that hit an unauthorised traditional gold mining area on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island and killed at least 11 people.

More than 100 villagers were digging for grains of gold on July 7 in the remote and hilly village of Bone Bolango when tons of mud plunged down the surrounding hills and buried their makeshift camps, said Heriyanto, head of the provincial Search and Rescue Office.

Rescue operations

Rescuers recovered six more bodies buried under tons of mud in a devastated hamlet where the gold mine is located.

“Improved weather allowed us to recover more bodies,” said Heriyanto, who goes by a single name, like many Indonesians.

According to data released on July 9 by his office, some 52 villagers managed to escape from landslide, about 23 people were pulled out alive by rescuers, including 18 injured, and 17 bodies were recovered, including three women and a 4-year-old boy. Some 45 others are missing, it said.

National Disaster Management Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari said torrential rains that have pounded the mountainous district since July 6 triggered the landslide and broke an embankment, causing floods up to the roofs of houses in five villages in Bone Bolango, which is part of a mountainous district in Gorontalo Province. Nearly 300 houses were affected and more than 1,000 people fled for safety

Challenging Rescue Operations Amid Adverse Conditions

Authorities deployed more than 200 rescuers, including police and military personnel, with heavy equipment to search for the dead and missing in a rescue operation that has been hampered by heavy rains, unstable soil, and the rugged, forested terrain, said Afifuddin Ilahude, a local rescue official.

“With many missing and some remote areas still unreachable, the death toll was likely to rise,” Mr. Ilahude said, adding that sniffer dogs were also being mobilized in the search.

Videos released by the National Search and Rescue Agency show rescue personnel using farm tools and sometimes their bare hands, pulling a mud-caked body from the thick mud before placing it in a black bag to take away for burial.

Monsoon rains cause frequent landslides and flash floods in Indonesia, an archipelago nation of more than 17,000 islands where millions of people live in mountainous areas or near floodplains.

Informal mining operations in Indonesia

Informal mining operations are common in Indonesia, providing a tenuous livelihood to thousands who labour in conditions with a high risk of serious injury or death. Landslides, flooding and collapses of tunnels are just some of the hazards facing miners. Much of gold ore processing involves highly toxic mercury and cyanide and workers frequently use little or no protection.

The country’s last major mining-related accident occurred in April 2022, when a landslide crashed onto an illegal traditional gold mine in North Sumatra’s Mandailing Natal district, killing 12 women who were looking for gold.

In February 2019, a makeshift wooden structure in an illegal gold mine in North Sulawesi province collapsed due to shifting soil and the large number of mining holes. More than 40 people were buried and died.

Salvage crews were set to lift the first piece of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge from the water on Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site, Maryland and U.S. officials said, the first step in a complex effort to reopen the city’s blocked port.

The steel truss bridge collapsed early on Tuesday morning, killing six road workers, when a massive container ship lost power and crashed into a support pylon, sending much of the span crashing into the Patapsco River, blocking the Port of Baltimore’s shipping channel.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore told a news conference that a section of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site would be cut into a piece that could be lifted by crane onto a barge and brought to the nearby Tradepoint Atlantic site at Sparrows Point.

“This will eventually allow us to open up a temporary restricted channel that will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse,” Moore said.

He declined to provide a timeline for this portion of the clearance work. “It’s not going to take hours,” he said. “It’s not going to take days, but once we complete this phase of the work, we can move more tugs and more barges and more boats into the area to accelerate our recovery.”

Workers will not yet attempt to remove a crumpled part of the bridge’s superstructure that is resting on the bow of the Dali, the 984-foot Singapore-flagged container ship that brought down the bridge. Moore said it was unclear when the ship could be moved, but said that its hull, while damaged, is “intact.”

“This is a remarkably complex operation,” Moore said of the effort to clear bridge debris and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic.

The bodies of two workers who were repairing the bridge deck at the time of the disaster have been recovered, but Moore said efforts to recover four others presumed dead remain suspended because conditions are too dangerous for divers to work amid too much debris.

Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy’s salvage arm and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the debris from the Patapsco River’s deep-draft shipping channel would have to be removed before the Dali could be moved.

Saturday’s operation involves cutting a piece just north of that channel and lifting it with a 160-ton marine crane onto a barge. A larger, 1,000-ton crane also is at the bridge site.

The piece will be brought to Tradepoint Atlantic, the site of the former Bethlehem Steel Mill which is being developed into a distribution center for companies including Amazon.com, Home Depot and Volkswagen. The facility’s port, which sits on the Chesapeake Bay side of the collapsed bridge, is fully operational.

Five days after the tragedy, the jobs of some 15,000 people whose work revolves around daily port operation are on hold. While logistics experts say that other East Coast ports should be able to handle container traffic, Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment.

U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said the Small Business Administration has approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration that allows small firms affected by the disaster to apply for emergency low-interest loans of up to $2 million through the end of 2024.

The federal government on Thursday awarded Maryland an initial $60 million in emergency funds to clear debris and begin rebuilding the Key Bridge, an extraordinarily fast disbursement. President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government would cover all costs of removing the debris and rebuilding the bridge.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)