Hundreds of Turkish rescue workers are searching a cyanide-filled field for nine miners who were engulfed by a landslide in an open-pit mine on Tuesday.
Video from the scene showed a landslide sweeping through the valley and hitting the road where some workers were traveling.
Turkey’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said the gold mine, located in Ilic District in the eastern Erzincan province, has a total of 667 employees, of whom there is no news about nine employees.
“We installed our [rescue] vehicles, our generators and our night lighting. We have only one wish: to bring good news to the families of these brothers. “
Experts and local officials said the search was complicated by the presence of cyanide, a highly toxic compound used to extract gold from ore, underground.
Basaran Aksu, a representative of the independent mining union, told Turkish media that “cyanide soil collapsed” at the site.
Aksu said specialized equipment is needed during the search.
“This work may take a long time due to the presence of the cyanide oil field, which is reported to be one of the largest in Turkey.
The province is located on the northern bank of the Karasu River, a major tributary of the Euphrates River that flows from Turkey through Syria and Iraq.
The Environment Ministry said it had blocked a stream flowing from the open-pit mine to prevent contamination of the Euphrates River.
Environmentalists and local officials sought to close the open-pit mine after a cyanide leak in 2022.
The plant was closed for several months but reopened after its operator paid a fine, sparking an outcry from Turkey’s opposition parties.
Engineer Cemalettin Küçük co-authored a report on safety as mine operators seek permission to expand capacity. He said the soil was filled with “rocks containing cyanide”.
“We are talking about a mountain weighing millions of tons,” Kuchuk told Turkish media. “We’ve warned about this many times.”
Mohamed Torun, former president of the Society of Mining Engineers, said the vast mass of soil that slid toward the Euphrates consisted of material washed with cyanide and sulfuric acid.
“For years, the mountain has been blown up to extract gold from the mountain… and the waste has been piled aside like a mountain of garbage. Now this giant mass is bathed in cyanide and flowing to the Euphrates,” he warned.
Anagold, the private company that operates the iliç mine, said it was working to minimize the impact of the “painful” incident.
“We will use all means to urgently get to the bottom of this incident,” Anagold said in a statement.
The Justice Department on Tuesday assigned four prosecutors to investigate the mine’s operations.
Turkey is prone to deadly landslides and has suffered a series of mining accidents in recent decades.
