Rescuers clawed through dirt Saturday in a desperate search for survivors a day after a landslide buried workers in mining tunnels in a gold-rich area in the southern Philippines.

But despite their efforts, officials in charge of the rescue warned that they were unlikely to find any more survivors, with at least 21 people still missing from Friday's pre-dawn landslide.

"We are still continuing our search and rescue. But most likely if we don't have any improvement tonight, by tomorrow, we will shift to (body) retrieval operations," said local military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Lyndon Paniza.

Officials said that so far, only three deaths have been confirmed and 13 people rescued. Paniza said earlier reports that 15 had been rescued were found to be a mis-count.

Officials in the Kingking mountain district where the landslide occurred have classified at least 21 people as missing but Paniza said other victims may also have been buried.

"We are relying on the names given by the district officials. We are hoping that there are no others who were not on that list," he told AFP.

It is difficult to pinpoint exact numbers for the missing because of the transient nature of mining work that draws people into the area.

The pre-dawn landslide covered numerous illegal, small-scale gold mines on the mountainside in Kingking, including mining tunnels, houses, stores and gold processing mills.

Such illegal mining operations, with inadequate safety measures, are common in the mineral-rich but poverty-stricken southern island of Mindanao.

The searchers, including soldiers, civil defence personnel and volunteers from other mines in the area, continued to dig, mostly using shovels and picks, hoping that some people may have survived in their mining tunnels.

The depth of collapsed earth, however, has lowered the chances of finding more survivors, said regional civil defence chief Liza Mazo.

"We are pessimistic. It is difficult (to dig) because the landslide is 15 to 20 metres (50 to 66 feet) deep," she told AFP.

At the Pantukan town hall, which serves as a makeshift command centre for the disaster, helicopters landed and took off regularly, taking officials to the landslide site at Kingking, over an hour's drive away.

Former small-scale miner Danding Labanan said he knew most of the missing and was not surprised by the tragedy.

"That area has long been considered dangerous but the miners wouldn't listen to the authorities so this happened," said Labanan, who now works as a blacksmith forging tools for the miners.

He said mining was likely to continue despite the landslide.

"People won't leave. They have no other lives except mining. I am a blacksmith now, but if an opportunity arose to mine, I would go back to the tunnels," he said.

In the wake of the disaster, provincial Governor Arturo Uy said he would impose a 30-day moratorium on small-scale mining.

Authorities said one person was killed and five others were injured in a landslide in the same area last month, while 21 people died when a similar disaster brought on by heavy rains hit the same location in May 2009.

The mayor of the district where the landslide occurred, Celso Sarenas, said he was helpless to stop people from mining in the disaster-prone site.

"Once, I tried to have the people evacuated. But when my aide went there, they pointed a gun at him. What else can we do?" he said in a television interview.

earlier related report
Over 20 missing, 3 dead in Philippine landslide
Davao, Philippines (AFP) April 22, 2011 - At least 21 people were missing and three confirmed dead after a night-time landslide ravaged a gold mining village in a mountainous area of the Philippines on Friday, authorities said.

The rain-triggered landslide hit at about 3am, ripping through shanty homes as miners and their families were sleeping, and destroying poorly constructed tunnels where the unregistered workers toiled for gold, they said.

Three bodies had been found by Friday afternoon while 10 people had been pulled from the debris alive, according to the mayor of the district where the disaster occurred, Celso Sarenas.

"There are at least 21 still unaccounted for. We do not know if they are dead or alive. They might have been buried," Sarenas told AFP by telephone.

The military earlier said as many as 40 or 50 people were missing, but Sarenas said the lower figure of 21 was more accurate as it was based on a roll call of people living in the area.

However Seranas said the exact number could not be known for certain, as transient miners may have arrived at the site just before the landslide without registering with authorities.

The landslide cut out a huge slice of a mountainside on the outskirts of Kingking, an isolated village in the resource-rich but violence-plagued and poor southern island of Mindanao.

Sarenas said as many as 500 people had been living on the mountain slope before the disaster, most of them poor, small-scale miners who had defied repeated government warnings to leave the extremely dangerous area.

"They are hard-headed. They told me, they would rather die from a landslide than die from hunger," he said.

"They want to get rich no matter how dangerous their tunnelling is."

Nevertheless Sarenas said many of the people living on the slope had temporarily left in recent days because of fears the rains would trigger a landslide, preventing a much higher death toll.

Authorities said one person was killed and five others were injured when a landslide hit the same area last month, while 21 people were killed when a similar landslide brought on by heavy rains hit the same place in May 2009.

Civil defence officials said rescue efforts had been hampered because the landslide had blocked roads to the area -- normally a couple of hours' drive from Mindanao's trading capital, Davao City.

"The route to the area is impassable, but we have heavy equipment that is already clearing the area," Susan Madrid, duty officer of the region's National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council, told AFP.

However soldiers and civil defence teams had quickly reached Kingking by helicopter or by hiking in from nearby villages.

The government, with the help of a US mining company that has been carrying out exploration work in the region, had also deployed heavy digging equipment.

Military sniffing dogs were sent in to find any buried bodies.

Sarenas said the search would continue through the night, with portable generators brought in to power lights.