Chinese miners trapped by flood

Production and Markets

Publishing Date: 04 Mar 2010 2:28pm GMT
Author: Mining Journal

Flooding at a coal mine in China has left 31 workers trapped since Monday despite ongoing rescue efforts.

Forty-six people were rescued from the mine, owned by the country’s largest coal producer, soon after the flood, the Xinhua news agency reported. One miner was confirmed dead and seven survived with slight injuries.

The mine is in the northern province of Inner Mongolia, and the owner, Shenhua Group Corp, dispatched divers to rescue the trapped workers. By Thursday, more than 1,000 rescuers were still struggling to reach the miners, who could to be up to 200m underground, despite drilling and pumping using four pumps.

Yang Xuelin, one of the seven survivors, described himself as “lucky”, saying “I saw a wave of water and eight people disappeared before I realised what was going on”.

An excavator operator from the northwestern Shaanxi Province, Mr Yang had just finished the night shift and was about 800m from the mining area when the flood occurred. “There was water on the ground,” said Yang. “Within a minute, the water rose to my waist.”

Meanwhile, a coal-mine explosion in the western Georgian town of Tkhibuli killed four people on Wednesday and injured many others, the regional governor said. The blast was apparently caused by methane.