"An elderly Kachin man wearing a white collared shirt and traditional checkered longyi stands alone, staring over the edge of a precipice. He is dwarfed by the ravaged landscape of Maw Wan Lay, a jade mining area north of Hpakant, in central Kachin State about 180 kilometres west of Myitkyina. On the ground beside him is a shrine: red roses, white chrysanthemums and a photograph of his son, delicately arranged on top of a mound of stones. Three photographs of the bereaved father’s tribute were uploaded to Facebook by his daughter, Ma Lu Lamung, on April 26. “Who would have understood the agony of a father whose only son perished. Not even a dead body to grieve over,” she wrote in her post. “My father kept looking down in tears to see whether he would get a glimpse of the body.” Her brother was buried alive four days earlier while working the night shift at a jade mine operated by Shwe Nagar Koe Kaung Company. Looming above him as he worked was an informal tailings dam in a disused mine formerly operated by Unity Gems Company. After Unity’s licence expired in October 2017, the open-cut site filled with water; after 18 months of illegal waste dumping by other miners, it was a lake of thick, unstable mud that covered at least three acres (1.2 hectares) and was 100 feet (30 metres) deep. “It was like an infinity pool over the miners’ heads,” U Maw Htun Aung, Myanmar country manager for the Natural Resource Governance Institute, told Frontier at his office in Yangon. “At the same time the miners did not stop digging and using dynamite to blast the rock apart,” he said. “They were basically living under a time bomb.” At about 11.30pm on April 22, the thin earthen wall that contained the dam collapsed, releasing a torrent of mud that surged into the open-cut mine below, submerging the workers. The next day, the Ministry of Information announced that 28 employees of Myanmar Thura Gems Company and 26 miners who worked for Shwe Nagar Koe Kaung Gems (Nine Golden Dragons) Company had been buried under the mud, along with 40 pieces of machinery owned by the two companies. What the report elided was that Myanmar Thura did not have a permit to mine in the blocks affected by the dam’s collapse. Nor did the other two companies that were reportedly extracting jade in the same area: Chaow Brothers Gemstone Enterprise, also known as Chaung Brothers, and KNDPC, or Kachin National Development and Progress Company. A Frontier investigation has found that this tragic accident at Hpakant was preventable and the result of a lack of political will and long-standing policy failures that have, if anything, worsened under the National League for Democracy government. The legal framework for jade mining is completely unsuitable for the nature of the business and has worsened under a newly introduced Gemstone Law. The companies were able to operate at the site without permits due to a lack of enforcement. The government has failed to ensure companies follow environmental and safety rules, and has stalled on planned reforms in these areas. The companies themselves were unwilling to acknowledge and act on the risks of mining so close to the dam. Deadly landslides are common in Hpakant. They are typically caused by the partial collapse of designated tailings heaps, where itinerant miners known as yemase are permitted to forage for pieces of jade among the crushed rock discarded by mining companies. The collapse of the tailings dams represents a new danger, though. Maw Htun Aung said at least 20 similar dams have formed in Hpakant at abandoned mines since the government imposed a moratorium on renewing jade permits in April 2016, pending a review of mining laws. Some of these are dangerously close to villages, he said, and Hpakant residents have been warning the government of the dangers for some time..."