A major emergency response operation to recover bodies trapped in an underground tunnel is continuing at the Freeport McMoran-run Grasberg gold and copper mine in Indonesia's Papua province.
Transcript
A major emergency response operation to recover bodies trapped in an underground tunnel is continuing at the Freeport McMoran-run Grasberg gold and copper mine in Indonesia's Papua province.
A week ago, 38 workers were trapped when the tunnel, which is part of a training facility separate from the active mining areas at Grasberg.
21 bodies have now been recovered with another 7 people still missing.
Johnny Blades reports that political leaders and Freeport's executives have flocked to remote Tembagapura to monitor the response to the most deadly accident in the history of the massive mine.
As staff at Freeport's Big Gossan underground training facility clambered amid chaos immediately following the landslide, it becomes clear that part of the facility had collapsed. The cries of trapped workers could be heard through walls. Freeport moved quickly to deploy a 200-strong emergency response team to the remote site. A Freeport spokesperson, Daisy Primayanti, says in unstable conditions, the team is inching closer to the remaining bodies.
DAISY PRIMAYANTI: 60 people out of the 200 people are specialised in underground rescue efforts. And it's 24 hours around the clock. The area presents with extreme difficulties in accessing the locations because of the debris, but also because rocks keep falling.
Papua's Governor Lukas Enembe and members of Indonesia's House of Representatives have been up to the site to gauge the response. The President and Chief Executive Officer of Freeport McMoran, Richard Adkerson, has flown in from America.Together with the head of PT Freeport Indonesia, Rozik Soetjipto, he visited injured workers as well as the families of workers still buried, and got a briefing at the incident site. Mr Adkerson said the company appreciates the hard work of the rescuers.
RICHARD ADKERSON: Our hearts are broken. And we're very serious about this. We feel like we've lost family members. And we want to provide support. We want our people here that are working now to be safe, because it's a dangerous situation. They're doing that. And we are going to respond to this, and we're going to do everything we can do to make sure this never happens again.
Daisy Primayanti says the chances of the team finding any of the trapped workers still alive are extremely thin.
DAISY PRIMAYANTI: The hope has, you know, gone down and down and down. They have mentioned that they could actually see bodies from a distance and they're trying to get closer to those and evacuate them as soon as possible.
PT Freeport Indonesia says it will conduct an investigation into the accident with help from international experts and officials from Indonesia's energy and mines ministry. It remains unclear how long operations might be suspended at the mine but it's another setback for Freeport, which is mired in an ongoing dispute with workers who went on a three-month strike in 2011 and forced suspension of production at the world's largest gold-mine.
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