More than 24 hours after it was discovered that a bulldozer operator and the heavy duty machine he was operating were pulled underground by quicksand at the Bosai Bauxite Mines in Linden, there continues to be no trace of the man’s body or the heavy duty equipment.
Other miners carefully dug for hours on Saturday into the night, but their searches came up empty handed as the mine site area is unlit and the company suspended the search operation as darkness creeped in.
The miner Neptrind Hercules, spent the last 42 years of his life in the bauxine mines. He was set to retire in October.
According to reports, Hercules was operating the bulldozer in the mine site on Friday night, pushing back slush and soil when a wall of earth material suddenly broke away as quicksand swallowed him and the bulldozer and covered them completely as more soil came crashing down.
By the time some of the other mine workers noticed what had happened and raised an alarm, it was too late.
The search operations started almost immediately, but some employees have lambasted the company for not having a proper search and rescue system in place.
Other mine workers are now being made to navigate the same area with the loose soil in search of their colleague.
It was explained to News Source by a miner who once worked in the same area, that the man and the equipment might be covered by hundreds of feet of soil in depth.
This afternoon, relatives and close friends of the missing miner staged a picket in front of the company’s head office. They said it was disgraceful, that the company did not put proper lighting in place to aid a non-stop search and rescue effort, instead choosing to suspend searches as night set in.
They are calling for a full investigation of the incident and a full investigatioon of the company’s operations and its safety systems.
The Bosai company, which is owned by a Chinese company, has remained silent about the mining incident and the missing employee.
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