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At least 74 dead in coal mine explosion in Hebei Province

The death toll from China's latest mining disaster rose to 74 yesterday, as rescue workers searched for at least 32 other miners still missing and grieving relatives crowded around the colliery.

Nearly 24 hours had passed since a powerful gas explosion at the Liuguantun coal mine near Tangshan, Hebei Province on Wednesday afternoon, and some family members were becoming desperate because of the lack of information.

"My older brother is inside," said Li Hongqing, himself a coal miner, as he stood, red-eyed from a night of futile waiting, among hundreds of curious onlookers.

"I have no idea if he's dead or alive but I prefer to believe there's still hope," he said.

Police formed a cordon at the gate of the coal mine, strictly curbing access, while rescue teams worked frantically in sub-zero temperatures to locate the 32 missing.

Each time police stepped aside to make way for a departing vehicle, Li and other relatives experienced a brief glimmer of hope. Each time they were disappointed.

An elderly woman sobbed quietly while a teenage girl walked aimlessly around, not knowing if she would see her boyfriend alive again.

"He's only 19 but he's already worked in the mine for three years," said the girl, who gave her surname as Liu.

A nurse at the nearby Tanggang Hospital said about 20 injured miners had been brought in since the explosion. Some had suffered horrible burns, according to a witness who saw them at the hospital.

The explosion came at the end of a two-week period that has been brutal even by the Chinese mining industry's notoriously dangerous standards.

As rescue work was under way in Tangshan, survival hopes were fading for 42 other miners trapped for six days in a flooded mine in Henan Province.

And in one of the worst mining disasters in recent years, 171 workers were killed on Nov. 27 after an explosion occurred at the state-run Dongfeng coal mine in Heilongjiang Province.

Lax supervision has been blamed for many recent disasters and the Tangshan incident could prove no exception.

State-run Xinhua news agency quoted unnamed local authorities as saying the colliery's management was very poor and the official number of people registered as being in the mine at the time of the blast was not reliable.

"I'm sure someone must have screwed up somewhere," said an elderly man in the crowd outside the colliery.

The man, who worked in the city's mining industry for decades before retiring, said there had been several small accidents in the area but this one was the biggest by far in 50 years.

"Security is all right, but this is inherently dangerous work," Wang Ruicheng, a 36-year-old miner who narrowly avoided the explosion, said as he sat in his dormitory about 1km from the colliery.

"No matter how much security you've got, it will never be enough. You just have to be careful," he said.

Wang described himself as "very lucky" not to be among the victims, having been on the shift that ended just hours before the explosion.
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