Disused shaft, slow evacuation blamed for China mine disaster

BEIJING - Slow evacuation and the failure to map and seal an adjacent disused shaft were major factors behind the trapping of 153 miners in a flooded Chinese coal shaft, state media said Wednesday.

Safety officials told the China Daily newspaper that workers had warned supervisors that water was seeping into the shaft at the Wangjialing mine in the northern province of Shanxi, three days before a flood trapped the miners.

Under mining regulations, those warnings should have prompted managers to suspend work pending safety inspections, the newspaper said.

After water began pouring into the shaft Sunday, a worker at the local mine rescue office received an emergency phone call but he had \”just woken up\” and took no action for three hours, the People\’s Daily said.

The mine managers had \”gone missing\” since the flood, the reports said.

Hundreds of workers were still pumping water out of the flooded shaft Wednesday as the chances of pulling out the miners alive appeared to be diminishing.

The Global Times quoted Wang Junfeng, a spokesman for the rescue team, as saying it was \”unclear\” if any of the missing miners were still alive.

Other reports quoted rescuers as saying the chances of survival might be better for 84 miners who were believed to be trapped above the floodwater.

Safety experts were quoted as saying the flood was caused by workers digging into a wall separating the Wangjialing shaft from an adjacent disused shaft. Some reports appeared to suggest that workers had been digging in the abandoned shaft.

A total of 108 miners escaped or were rescued soon after Sunday\’s flood when 261 people were working underground, the State Administration of Work Safety said.

Most of the missing miners were migrant workers from four Chinese provinces who were constructing a large state-owned mine designed to produce six million tonnes of coal annually.

Shanxi, a major coal-producing area in China, has a poor mine safety record. In November, 12 workers died after an explosion at a mine in Shanxi\’s Jiexiu City.

The local government has been attempting to rein in the industry by closing small and medium-sized mines and reducing the overall number of mines through mergers.

Last year, 2,631 people died in coal-mining accidents nationwide, the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety