Police are investigating a mining accident that occurred in Region Eight (Potaro-Siparuni) on Friday morning and has left two miners dead.
The dead are Sherwayne Joseph, 26, and Imran Blake, 19, of Kuru Kuru Village, Soesdyke-Linden Highway.
Reports are that, at the St Elizabeth Backdam, a Potaro riverine community in Region Eight, at about 02:30h on Friday, Joseph and Blake were part of a nine-member team of workers on an eight-inch land dredge mining operation owned by a 38-year-old dredge owner of 111 Miles, Mahdia. They and three others were inside the mining pit when a co-worker heard a rumbling sound and saw the land and soil beginning to collapse into the pit. The worker raised an alarm, but Joseph and Blake did not escape in time. Only one body has been recovered, but investigations are continuing.
For this year so far, several deadly mining accidents have occurred across Guyana’s interior.
Dead: Sherwayne Joseph
When a mining pit at Arakaka in the North West District (NWD) of Region One (Barima-Waini) collapsed in June this year, it resulted in the death of Timothy Fraser, a miner who was covered by the rubble of the collapse.
Just days before that, another miner was injured when the wall of a 17-foot pit collapsed at Perseverance in Matarkai.
Just a week prior, miner Leon Lyken lost his life at Frenchman Backdam in Region Ten (Upper Demerara-Upper Berbice) after a section of a pit collapsed while the 27-year-old resident of Zeelugt, East Bank Essequibo (EBE) was working therein with others.
Lyken was trapped by debris while his colleagues managed to escape, though one had sustained a broken foot and other injuries.
More than a month before the Lyken incident, Stephen Mark Samuels, a 47-year-old miner of Karwap Mission in the Pomeroon riverine community of Region Two, died when the pit in which he was operating at Puruni Backdam in Region Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni)collapsed.
Samuels had been employed by a Brazilian national, and had been working in a pit when part of the eastern wall collapsed and buried him. His coworkers had raised an alarm and had managed to retrieve his motionless body from the rubble.
