A 15-year-old Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidate of the Sekyere Himang Methodist JHS in the Wassa East District of the Western Region, on Tuesday met his untimely death when he drowned in an abandoned galamsey pit at Sekyere Himang.
The deceased, Ransford Donkor, reportedly went to wash in the abandoned pit after carrying farm produce from his village to Hemang, which is few meters away for onward transportation to Beposo, a popular market centre. His lifeless body was found floating in the pit by some community members who retrieved it for burial.
Abandoned galamsey pits over the years have fatally trapped many people with Illegal miners and other small-scale miners leaving deep pits they dig up for their operations.
Whilst others fail to reclaim the pits on the excuse of the expensive nature of reclamation, environmentalists blame it on the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Minerals Commission for the weak regulation of the sector.
Illegal mining, apart from polluting river bodies, destroying cocoa and other farmlands also accounts for the death of many miners.
source: citifm