Rescuers battling to recover the bodies of scores of small-scale miners trapped in a mine pit at Akyempim, near Dunkwa-on-Offin, are considering deploying an excavator to speed up the process.
Ms Helen Ntoso, Director of Operations of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), said this has become necessary given the
difficulty of picking through the muddy pit.
Only 13 bodies out of the over 100 miners including women and children believed to have been buried under tonnes of mud and water, had been recovered as of Thursday, five days after the disaster.
Ms Ntoso told newsmen at the mine site that, the reliance on spade and other hand tools was proving more difficult, slow and tiresome.
The recovered bodies, she said, were found just at the exit point and the suspicion was that more bodies might have been buried deep inside the pit.
The fact that none of the bodies was identified to be that of a woman, although survivors insist that about 20 women were in the pit at the time and are unaccounted for, is heightening fears that there are scores of dead
bodies yet to be reached.
Alhaji Collins Dauda, Minister of Lands and Forestry, who has been at the site for three days, said there was no hope of finding anyone alive.
Considering the depth of the pit, water and mud, it would be a miracle for anybody to have survived.
The Minister however, pledged that every effort would be made to remove the dead from the pit.
Alhaji Dauda said the badly disfigured bodies were making identification difficult and unnerving, and therefore a meeting had been
held with the chiefs and the bereaved families for mass burial of the victims.
It is estimated that about 155 miners were working in the pit when it collapsed on them.