20000116

China scrambles to save trapped coalminers

BEIJING: Chinese rescue workers were racing against the clock on Saturday to rescue 33 men trapped deep underground in a flooded coalmine, officials said. Seven coalminers were killed in the incident.

This is the sixth serious accident in a Chinese mine already this year and brought the known death toll to 40, the China Coal Industry News reported on Saturday. Several hundreds die every year in the country's coal mines.

Officials said it was not known for sure how many of the men trapped in the mine in the eastern province of Jiangsu since Tuesday were still alive, but noises were being heard through a narrow shaft rescuers had dug through the rubble.

"We are still digging and have accelerated our work," said an official of the Xuzhou Coal Mine Group which operates the flooded mine.

"It's hard to say anything at this stage, the situation inside the tunnel is very complicated," he said.

Another official said: "It's hard to know how many are dead because no messages have been sent from the inside. Some of them must still be alive since we can still hear noises."

Relatives of the trapped men were waiting anxiously for news near the pit head, officials said.

The miners were trapped 320 metres (1,050 feet) underground after water raced into the mine on Tuesday and killed three people instantly, state media reported.

Four died later, but 23 trapped miners had been pulled out alive by Wednesday afternoon, the China Youth Daily said.

Rescue workers had cut a narrow shaft through the debris and were pushing oxygen, milk and water through it to the trapped miners, officials said.

But they said the absence of word from the trapped miners meant it was not certain they had got the supplies.

On Monday, a gas explosion killed five men in a coal mine in the northeastern province of Helongjiang. A similar accident in the southern province of Guizhou left five dead, the China Coal Industry News said.

Last week, 21 people were killed in two gas explosions in two coal mines in the northestern province of Liaoning and the eastern province of Shandong, it said.

Ten miners were killed in the northern province of Shanxi in a gas explosion on January 3, the newspaper said.

China produced 1.03 billion tonnes of coal in 1999, meeting its target to reduce annual output by 200 million tonnes due to a continuing glut which caused the industry to make losses of 3.81 billion yuan ($460.2 million).

It planned to lower output further this year to 870 million tonnes.-Reuters