Authorities in the southern Philippines say six people are dead and dozens are missing after a landslide in a gold mining village.
The disaster occurred late Tuesday night in Masara, a village in the town of Maco in Davao de Oro province. The landslide destroyed several houses and buried two buses used to transport workers to the mine operated by Philippine-based Apex Mining.
A provincial government spokesman says search and rescue crews are digging through the debris to find at least 27 miners who were on the two buses when the landslide hit. Eight other miners managed to escape by jumping out of windows before the buses were buried under the mud.
The spokesman said a total of 46 people are missing, although it is not clear if that number includes the 27 miners.
Hundreds of families near Masara have been evacuated from their homes and placed in emergency shelters.
The southern Mindanao region has been inundated with several weeks of heavy rains, but the bad weather had eased by Tuesday, with the landslide appearing to have caught residents by surprise.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
