/ 23 November 2006

Polish mine disaster toll rises

The toll in one of Europe’s deadliest mining accidents for years rose to 22 on Thursday, as rescue workers at a southern Polish pit discovered more bodies and hopes faded of finding the remaining missing miner alive.

Rescuers who have been battling hellish conditions at the Halemba mine at Ruda Slaska in Poland’s Silesian coalbelt since a methane gas blast on Tuesday found 16 more bodies after resuming operations, said Zbigniew Madej, spokesperson for the KW operating company.

They first found three bodies in the gallery where the accident happened, then a further 12, before locating another victim, said Madej.

One miner was still listed as missing.

However, said Madej, any hope of finding anyone alive was close to impossible.

Temperatures in the mine hit 1 000° to 1 500°C during the explosion, creating ”conditions which can only be compared with war”, Madej added.

Twenty-six miners had been working in the shaft about 1 000m underground when disaster struck on Tuesday afternoon.

Three were able to make it back to the surface in the aftermath of the explosion and rescue workers recovered six bodies, all too badly charred to be identified, in initial emergency operations late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday.

But search operations were called off and restarted repeatedly amid fears that high concentrations of methane gas could endanger the rescue workers.

The miners trapped or killed in the blast were carrying out work to permanently close down a shaft which had been damaged in an earlier accident in March.

Experts had already said that hopes of finding any of the trapped miners survived were slim at best.

”The only chance for them is if they were thrown clear by the blast and found themselves in part of the mine shaft were there was still some air,” Juliusz Jakubaszko, head of the Polish Association of Emergency Medicine, said on Wednesday.

Miners’ friends and relatives flocked to the mine after the blast on Tuesday afternoon, and have kept up their agonising vigil since then.

Catholic chaplains have organised masses at the mine for the victims, and a team of psychologists was also on hand to give counsel and comfort to the waiting friends and relatives.

A previous methane explosion killed 19 miners in 1990 at Halemba, one of around 35 working mines in Poland, the EU’s biggest coal producer.

The latest catastrophe is the worst in Poland since 1979, when 34 miners died in an explosion at the Dymitrow pit at Bytom, which is also in Silesia. – Sapa-AFP