Many more deaths and injuries go unreported at China's smaller mines, which routinely cover up accidents.
Badly injured, Luo was driven to a hospital three hours away to hide the incident. To this day, the mine denies there ever was an accident.
Efforts to buttress mine safety are being made worldwide. A fatal methane gas explosion at a West Virginia mine in early last year set off a flurry of new regulation in the US.
Likewise, China has cracked down on unsafe practices in the past two years, bringing down the number of deaths by 20 percent from a peak of nearly 7,000 in 2002, even as coal production has increased.
Until 1998, China's state-run Huainan Mining Group, which mines coal seams containing high amounts of dangerous methane gas, had an explosion almost every year.
"We had no good methods, no technology to control the gas," said Yuan Liang, a senior Huainan executive who investigated a 1997 blast that killed more than 130 miners.
Even today, gaps remain. US safety inspectors acknowledge that they failed to carry out mandated quarterly inspections at every underground mine this year.
A new federal law requires air packs, devices that give miners about an hour's worth of oxygen in an emergency; while 125,000 have been distributed, an equal number remain on back order.
In China, the progress has come mainly at large, state-owned mines, the best of which now have safety levels approaching western standards.
But 80 percent of the casualties occur at small operations, many of which dodge government crackdowns, often aided by local officials who sometimes are part-owners.
It was into that world that Luo entered. Raised in an isolated valley of terraced fields, 35km down a dirt road that hugs mountainsides, Luo never thought about becoming a miner.
For a century, ever since his ancestors migrated north to the central China town of Chang'gou -- a name that literally means "long gulch" -- farming small plots of wheat and corn has been the way of life.
But China's economic boom has generated previously unimagined opportunities in the cities -- and created a growing income divide between urban areas and the still poor countryside.
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