Sunstar Iloilo
Sunday, July 19, 2015
THE Provincial Government of Antique dispatched a team from its disaster and risk reduction management council to investigate the July 17 collapse of a portion of the mining site of the Semirara Mining and Power Company.
The incident buried nine workers, with only five bodies retrieved the next day.
In a radio interview, Antique Governor Rhodora Cadiao said the collapse happened around 3 a.m. Friday. It was raining hard for several days in the island, aggravating a landscape and the collapse of the mining pit.
Semirara Island hosts the country’s biggest coal mine located within the Caluya group of islands off in northern Antique.
Semirara Mining is a unit of Philippine conglomerate DMCI Holdings and supplies more than 90 percent of the total coal production in the country.
There were nine workers at the site when the accident happened. They were presumed buried alive as admitted by Isidro Consunji, CEO of Semirara Mining.
Pauline Rose Geroche, municipal information officer of Caluya, said fie were confirmed dead and four others remained missing as of noontime Saturday, July 18.
The body of Bernie Manrique, 39, was recovered during retrieval operations at 3:40 a.m. Saturday. The body of Danilo Dayupan was found at 9:26 p.m. Friday and subsequently, that of workers Alexander Nudo, Ricardo Panes, and Arnold Omac. All five are heavy equipment operators.
Cadiao said that on Friday noon, the Department of Energy ordered the temporary suspension of Contract 5 of the coal mining operations effective immediately following the collapse of its Panian Pit 1 on Friday. In fact, this was the second time the company suffered a collapse.
On February 13, 2013, five miners were also killed when a wall of the mining pit also collapsed.
The company operations are capable of producing eight million metric tons of coal a year. It has installed generating capacity of 600 megawatts with additional 1,200 megawatts in the pipeline.
The company covers an area of 55 square kilometers in the island and operates one mine at Panian. It has a contract with the National Power Corporation while some of its output goes as fuel to cement plants, paper mills, textile dying plants, canneries, food factories, a sugar mill and a fertilizer plant among its customers. (Lydia C. Pendon) source
No comments:
Post a Comment