Until now the actual number of miners and other people feared to have been trapped in a quarry which crumbled in Tanzania’s Lake Zone, is still not known.
However, the previously announced number of dead victims remains 25, with President Samia Suluhu sending condolences to the affected families.
Located in the Mwenge area of Nyandolwa section of Shinyanga region the mining quarry is reportedly owned by the ‘Wachapa Kazi Group,’ based in the Mwongozo village within the Shinyanga District Council.
Mining quarries have been collapsing and killing workers in the Shinyanga District for quite some time now, but there have been no dedicated efforts to contain the situation.
Usually it is always ordinary people, especially fellow artisanal miners, who perform the rescue operations despite being badly equipped and poorly financed.
The local fire brigade have not been useful, which is always the same case throughout Tanzania.
The Shinyanga District Commissioner Julius Mtatiro who visited the scene of the accident said the bodies of dead victims were found in three chambers of the mines, labelled 106, 103 and 20.
Pit number 103 had most people with 11 bodies; Pit number 20 had eight people.
On her part, the Shinyanga Regional Commissioner Mboni Mhita revealed that the people who got killed when the quarry caved in, were in the process of conducting periodical and routine maintenance inside the mines.
“The buried people were doing some maintenance work in the mining shafts,” she said.
Tanzania is the continent’s fourth-largest gold producer, and mining accidents are not uncommon, with miners often lacking adequate safety equipment.
In January last year, 22 miners died in a landslide at another gold mine in the north of the country, after it was hit by torrential rain.
Again some seven years ago, in January 2017, 15 people were rescued after being trapped underground for two days after their mine collapsed.