Early on Saturday morning, Reuters reports, in northern Myanmar, where some of the world’s most desirable jade is produced, a mountain of mining debris gave way, triggering a landslide. More than 100 people were missing on Sunday, and 97 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage.

Authorities expect the number of dead to continue to rise. “We just don’t know how many people exactly were buried since we don’t have any data on people living there,” a local official, Tin Swe Myint, told Reuters.

“It was just a slum with these...workers living in makeshift tents. Nobody knows for sure how many and where they had come from.”

The cause of the landslide, which, according to a miner at a nearby camp, occurred around three in the morning, is unclear.

From the BBC:

In a report in October, advocacy group Global Witness said that the value of jade produced in 2014 alone was $31bn (£20.4bn) - the equivalent of nearly half the country’s GDP - yet hardly any of the money is reaching ordinary people or state coffers.

Local people in mining areas accuse the mining industry of a series of abuses, including poor on-site health and safety and frequent land confiscations.

Many jade mining areas have been turned into a moon-like areas of environmental destruction as huge diggers churn the earth in search of the translucent green stones.

“Large companies, many of them owned by families of former generals, army companies, cronies and drug lords are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year through their plunder of Hpakant,” Global Witness’ Mike Davis told the Associated Press. “Scores of people at a time are buried alive in landslides.”

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.