Forty-two miners were trapped for a second day on Sunday in a flooded mine in central China, as more than 200 rescuers raced against the clock to pump out water to save them, state media said.
The miners have been trapped since shortly before midnight late on Friday when the Sigou mine suddenly flooded, according to the Xinhua news agency. The mine is located in Shisi township, Xin’an county, Henan province.
The accident happened as the country was still reeling from a deadly gas explosion that killed 169 miners last Sunday at the state-run Dongfeng coal mine near Qitaihe city in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province.
The miners were stranded in a pit with more than 3 000 cubic metres of water, Xinhua cited local rescue officials as saying.
It will take more than 20 hours for rescuers to pump out enough water to allow them to go down the shaft, repair the damaged tunnel and find the stranded miners, Xinhua said.
There was still a chance for the miners to survive, according to the deputy director of Xin’an county Zhao Xiaoli.
”There is still a tunnel above the water level. Some of the workers who escaped saw some miners running towards higher levels,” Zhao said.
”If the air quality is good in the shaft, these miners still have a rather big space to survive.”
The water was receding at a rate of 10cm every 10 minutes, said Li Zhenhuan, deputy director of the Henan province coal mine industry bureau’s safety inspection division, according to Xinhua.
The concentration of toxic gas in the mine has also fallen enormously, Xinhua quoted officials at the rescue headquarters as saying.
However, the mine’s owner Jin Changsong and other managers have fled. The mine did not have proper licenses to operate, Xinhua said.
Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday ordered the Henan provincial government to spare no efforts to save the miners and arrest the mine owner and managers.
Seventy-six miners were working in the mine at the time of the flooding and only 34 managed to escape immediately. – Sapa-AFP