Qualla: Nambija Mine Disaster https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:08 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Nambija Mine Disaster https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster Nambija Mine Disaster: Introduction https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster/ Photo credit Sunstarfire, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was Mother's Day, May 9, 1993, and the afternoon air in Nambija was thick with rain. Ten thousand people lived on roughly a single square kilometer of Andean valley, their homes built on top of the tunnel entrances to the gold mines that fed them. Many of those homes were made of corrugated tin. Many of the mothers being celebrated that day were inside them. When the mountain at the end of the valley gave way, it buried about eighty houses and an estimated 200 to 250 people sheltering from the storm. Working miners died in the shafts below. The exact count will never be known. Nambija kept no registers of who lived there or who worked the pits, and many of the dead still lie under the slide today.

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Image: Sunstarfire | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/6prb-nambija-mine-disaster-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Nambija Mine Disaster: A Town Built on Itself https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster/ Photo credit Sunstarfire, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nambija sits high in the mountains of Zamora-Chinchipe Province in southeastern Ecuador, about thirty kilometers east of Zamora and close to the Peruvian border. A three-hour drive over a gravel road built only in 1986 gets you there. The town clings to steep slopes at 2,600 mete...

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Image: Sunstarfire | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/6prb-nambija-mine-disaster-a-town-built-on-itself.mp3 0:06 2 full Nambija Mine Disaster: The Day the Mountain Fell https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster/ Photo credit Sunstarfire, CC BY-SA 3.0. The days before May 9 had brought torrential rain. Soil that was already loose from years of undercutting turned to slurry. Sometime that afternoon, a large section of the mountain above the mines and the upper town simply let go. Eighty homes vanished. The people inside them, al...

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Image: Sunstarfire | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/6prb-nambija-mine-disaster-the-day-the-mountain-fell.mp3 0:06 3 full Nambija Mine Disaster: The People Under the Mountain https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster/ Photo credit Sunstarfire, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is easy to let Nambija disappear into phrases like "informal miners" and "one of the worst mining disasters ever." The people who died were not statistics of risk acceptance. They were parents and children and siblings who had come to these mountains because there was gold in ...

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Image: Sunstarfire | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/6prb-nambija-mine-disaster-the-people-under-the-mountain.mp3 0:06 4 full Nambija Mine Disaster: Still Mining, Still Grieving https://qualla.com/nambija-mine-disaster/ Photo credit Sunstarfire, CC BY-SA 3.0. The scar of the 1993 slide is still visible on the mountainside, and it is now treated as a mass grave - most of the bodies were never recovered. In the parts of the settlement that were not buried, work resumed within days. This was not callousness. It was necessity. There was n...

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Image: Sunstarfire | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/p/r/b/nambija-mine-disaster-wp/6prb-nambija-mine-disaster-still-mining-still-grieving.mp3 0:06 5 full