About 10 people were hurt or killed when a large truck overturned in Hyesan’s Masanryong Pass in mid-August, Daily NK has learned.
According to a Daily NK source in Yanggang Province last Friday, a truck carrying workers of the Hyesan Youth Mine overturned in the Masanryong Pass in Masan-dong, Hyesan on Aug. 20.
The source said the workers had been mobilized to obtain sand and gravel needed to repair the mine’s tunnels. They obtained what they needed in Samsu County, loaded the supplies on the truck and were returning to the mine when the vehicle’s brakes suddenly gave out at the top of the Masanryong Pass.
Six of the truck’s passengers were immediately killed, while another eight were badly injured and are currently being hospitalized.
The source said nobody knows when the injured workers will recover as they suffered broken vertebrae and ribs and serious head contusions, among other injuries.
The source said the accident presumably resulted from torrential rains last month “collapsing some unpaved roads” such as the one through the Masanryong Pass, and because vehicles “are improperly inspected.”
Meanwhile, the mine is reportedly providing the wounded with neither medical support nor even proper financial support.
The mine has simply asked co-workers of the injured laborers to organize frequent hospital visits, with co-workers taking turns paying a single visit to their hurt comrades.
The families of the hospitalized workers not only have to provide food and medicine for the injured, but nurse them as well. Relatives are reportedly venting their anger at the situation, complaining of their plight.
The bereaved relatives of the deceased are also expressing their resentment with the mine offering no compensation beyond covering some of the funeral costs, the source said.
“The laborers received nothing more than death and injuries from a workplace they showed up at every day even though it gave them neither a kilo of rice nor a single cent,” said the source.
“Workplace officials treat absenteeism as a crime, like you have an ideological problem, and force you to go to work,” he continued, adding, “And when an accident happens while you’re on the job, they play dumb and dodge responsiblity by chalking it up to ‘fate.’ So the families of the dead and injured cannot repress their rage.”
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