Desperate efforts to save 181 Chinese coal miners from two shafts flooded with water and mud faced near impossible odds on Wednesday, as a safety official said mine owners had failed to anticipate the threat of disaster.
The miners have been trapped since Friday, when a river dyke burst in torrential rain, sending water surging into the shafts — a main one where 172 miners were missing and another nearby where there were nine.
The drama over the missing miners in the eastern province of Shandong has become a test of shaken public faith in government promises to improve safety at mines — long the world’s deadliest as producers strain to feed voracious energy demand.
Officials vowed to press ahead with attempts to pump the shafts dry, but even the official Xinhua news agency has said there was little hope of the men emerging alive.
Rescuers face more than 12-million cubic metres of water mixed with 300 000 cubic metres of mud and coal, the State Administration of Work Safety said.
A drill operator said his machinery was struggling to break through so more pumps could get to work.
”The ground surface is too hard and the drill can’t dig in and kicks back,” he told China Radio International.
The mine head’s frame was too short and unsteady to support bigger pumps brought in and rescuers were still nearly 100m from 14 miners believed closest to the surface, Xinhua news agency said.
Relatives of the missing have protested that officials and the Huayuan Mining Company, which runs the bigger shaft, did not act to protect the men from swollen waters, have failed to keep kin informed, and are trying to wash away culpability by calling the incident a ”natural disaster”.
Some of their accusations have been backed by the State Administration of Work Safety, which told the China Youth Daily that authorities did not heed signs of potential calamity.
Since July, there had been 15 cases of heavy rain causing mine floods, the agency spokesperson, Huang Yi, was quoted as saying.
”This shows that responses to accidents sparked by natural disasters have been inadequate, some employers have been lackadaisical and the preparation plans of the concerned parties been inadequate,” he told the paper.
Only a day before the disaster, safety officials gathered in Xintai discussed the threat of floods in coal mines.
China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, which distributes disaster relief, also said the floods were a ”natural disaster” — which usually do not attract official compensation — but families could expect special help because the victims were working at the time.
Public anger over official handling of the disaster has spilled over into the usually restrained state-run media.
”As long as this is classified as a natural disaster, the coal-mine leaders and the Xinwen coal authority can escape blame,” a reader, who said they were from from Xinwen, where main shaft is, wrote on the Sina news website.
”Then they don’t have to care about 172 wronged souls or the anguish of the families who have lost their kin.”
More than 2 000 people have been killed in China’s coal mines in the first seven months of this year alone. — Reuters