Sixty-six miners were trapped underground on Sunday after a pre-dawn gas explosion led tunnels to collapse inside a coal mine where they were working in northern Mexico.
Soldiers, firefighters, civil protection workers and specialised teams from the mine company were expected to work through the night in a desperate attempt to reach the men. Rescuers had yet to establish contact by late afternoon and neither the extent of oxygen supplies nor the damage done to the mine by the explosion was clear. Officials said a crowd of several hundred people had gathered at the pit in a remote desert area in the northern state of Coahuila about 95km from the border with Texas.
The crowd included many relatives of the trapped workers. Local government spokesperson David Aguillon said the miners were at a depth of between 150m and 800m from the rescuers via the mine’s tunnelled underground routes.
Aguillon said 11 miners, who were working near the surface when the explosion rocked the mine at about 2am, were pulled out immediately. Nine needed hospital treatment for burns, broken bones, bruises and other minor injuries. All were expected to recover.
Few details had emerged about the cause of the explosion. A Red Cross spokesperson blamed gases which ignited inside the mine but did not go into details.
”Right now we are working on getting out the gas,” Sergio Guajardo told Reuters. ”The ventilators are working at full speed.” The mine is owned by Grupo Mexico, the world’s third biggest copper mining company, which also mines other minerals. ”We are working to reach the areas where the people are trapped using very specialised machines,” a spokesperson for the company told Reuters.
The mine is located near the town of Sabinas, also the site of the worst mining accident in modern Mexican history. On February 1908 about 200 coal miners died when shafts collapsed after an explosion.
Under Spanish colonial rule Mexico was a mining country with a great many people dying in silver mines that provided the Spanish crown with enormous wealth.
In modern times mining’s importance to the national economy has slipped, although it remains significant. Today Coahuila contains Mexico’s most important coal mining region with privately-owned mines primarily geared up to serve local power and steel industries. – Guardian Unlimited Â