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Landslide kills 34 workers in Guatemala
Rescue workers dug with shovels and their bare hands to recover bodies on Monday after at least 34 coffee workers were killed by a landslide as they walked along a road in northern Guatemala.
- Reuters
- Published: 23:58 January 6, 2009
- Rescue personnel carry the body of a landslide victim at a cemetery in San Cristobal, Guatemala, on Monday. The landslide, triggered by a geological fault, brought some 10,000 tonnes of rock crashing down in a sparsely populated area near the small indigenous town of San Cristobal Verapaz, around 200 km north of Guatemala City.
- Image Credit: Reuters
San Cristobal Verapaz: Rescue workers dug with shovels and their bare hands to recover bodies on Monday after at least 34 coffee workers were killed by a landslide as they walked along a road in northern Guatemala.
Guatemala's Assistant Minister of Public Works Wilfredo Garcia said it was unclear how much higher the death toll from Sunday's landslide would go, although rescue workers at the scene estimated at least nine more people were unaccounted for.
The workers suspended their search at dusk after being hampered all day by falling rocks that made it impossible to get heavy machinery to the area, in the mountainous northern department of Alta Verapaz.
"The people doing the rescue [work] are taking every precaution because there are rockfalls every two minutes," Garcia told a news conference.
The landslide, triggered by a geological fault, brought about 10,000 tonnes of rock crashing down in a sparsely populated area near the small indigenous town of San Cristobal Verapaz, around 200 km north of Guatemala City.
The victims were labourers returning home from coffee farms in a nearby department. They had apparently ignored warnings not to use the road, which was closed in December after a smaller rockfall killed two people.
The mayor of San Cristobal Verapaz, Leopoldo Ical, said around 80 farmworkers had been travelling in two trucks when they reached the closed road near the hamlet of Los Chorros and continued on foot.
The lush hillsides of Alta Verapaz department are prime areas for growing coffee and cardamom but a geological fault in the limestone rock formations cuts straight through the area.
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