Electricity shortages were slowing attempts to clear a flooded mine shaft on Monday, and community members began to lose hope for 57 miners trapped for a fourth day in China’s worst mining accident this year.
Rescuers threaded hoses into the main shaft and carted steel pipes into a secondary entrance to the Xinjing mine in the dusty north China hill country, where poverty and China’s massive appetite for energy are fuelling risky and often deadly mining practices.
The rescue effort, however, soon ran into problems. Rescuers said they didn’t have enough electricity to drive the pumps. The teams worked without apparent haste. With no ambulance or medical personnel on the site, it appeared rescuers were not expecting to find anyone alive from Thursday’s accident.
”We must go all out to rescue these men. But we also need to start preparing for the worst,” Feng Lixiang, mayor of the nearby city Datong, which administers the area, was quoted as saying in local newspapers. Shen Wenhui, wife of one missing miner, said she was ”in despair” with no news of her husband.
The undercurrent of pessimism added to an emerging picture that the Xinjing mine was chaotically managed and indifferent to miners’ safety. China’s top work-safety official, Li Yizhong, on Monday accused the mine’s managers of sending miners into a coal seam beyond its approved area. Other officials charged that the managers tried to cover up the accident.
Mine manager Li Fuyuan and at least eight other officials have been detained for questioning, although the mine’s owner fled, state media reported. A spokesperson for the national work-safety office, Huang Yi, said investigators were looking to see whether local officials have financial ties to the mine.
”There’s no such thing as accidents. They’re all caused by human factors,” said Fang Zhipeng, a 47-year-old worker at a neighbouring mine and one of scores of onlookers watching the rescue workers at Xinjing, which lies in bone-dry countryside about one hour’s drive from the mining centre of Datong.
Such negligence is common in China, where coal is an addiction and the mines are among the deadliest in the world, with about 6 000 deaths a year. China relies on coal for two-thirds of the energy needed to fuel its robust economy. Mines routinely disregard safety regulations — and appeals from Beijing — to mine more coal and make more money.
Even by these standards, the situation at Xinjing appeared particularly dismal. Wages were as high as 5 000 yuan ($600) a month — a huge sum in a country with an annual average income of about $1 000 a year.
Yet living conditions were grim and primitive for the 1 500 miners and their family members, mostly migrants from poorer rural areas. Dormitories of wood and brick spread across the bottom of a dry creek bed below the mine, where garbage blew in the breeze.
There appeared to be no sewage system or running water.
Police maintained checkpoints along roads leading to the mine and a dozen cruisers patrolled the area, possibly to guard against violence by angry miners or relatives of the missing.
State media, which often give scant attention to mining disasters, gave prominent coverage to Xinjing’s problems, underscoring Beijing’s anger.
When the accident occurred, managers reported only five fatalities, only later revising the number of missing upward to 44 and then 57, the reports said. Family members of the missing were driven across the nearby provincial boundary into Inner Mongolia to keep them quiet, reports said.
Managers didn’t keep track of how many miners were in the pit during shifts and dismissed warnings from miners about water leaks in the shaft at least three days before the accident, state media reported.
Miners who wouldn’t give their names said accidents were frequent and complained that managers pressured them to dig faster or be fired.
The trapped miners were reportedly mining a seam outside the mine’s approved operating range when they bored through to an abandoned shaft filled with water that streamed in under high pressure, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Standing outside his tiny dormitory room beside a stinking toilet, a miner from the central province of Henan said he simply ran when he heard shouts that water had entered the mine.
”I was near the entrance, and when we heard there was water, we ran,” said the man, who would only give his surname, Wang. — Sapa-AP