Rescue workers found alive a majority of 13 Russian miners who had been trapped deep underground for six days.
One of the miners died, one was missing and 11 others survived, officials of the regional rescue headquarters said.
Meanwhile, in the Russian Far East, an explosion in a mine in the Primorye region, claimed five lives. Another 66 miners were rescued after an explosion in the "Tsentralnaya Mine" in the town of Partizansk, Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said.
PHOTO: EPA
At the Zapadnaya mine in Novoshakhtinskdied, southern Russia, the men were located yesterday morning, when drillers managed to break through to the pitface where the miners had sought refuge, the officials said. The miners were to be brought up to the surface later yesterday.
Rescuers had tunneled through solid rock from an adjacent mine to reach the miners, who had been stranded by icy water. Emergency officials had worked to plug the hole through which water had flowed into the shaft. Hundreds of tonnes of rock, soil and reinforced concrete pillars had been dumped into the shaft to seal the leak.
Emergency workers on Tuesday had stopped the flow of water into a flooded mine in southern Russia, officials said, as drillers came within meters of the men's presumed location.
The rescue teams were working in shifts, emerging from the mine with blackened faces and exhausted-looking eyes. They have tunneled through about 50m in four days, compared with the month such a job usually requires, Russian state television reported.
The miners were working some 800m below ground last Thursday when water from a subterranean lake leaked into a shaft above them, blocking their way to the surface. On Saturday, 33 other miners who had been trapped by the flood were rescued.
Lyubov Tkach said her husband Sergei had been with the 33 but that he got separated. She sat in the mine company headquarters on Tuesday, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, waiting for news.
"We are all in despair," she said. "But I hope he is alive and didn't go far from the place where he got lost. I really hope everything will be fine."
Alexander Kornichenko, the deputy chairman of the Russian mine safety authority, said Monday that rescue officials believed the miners had found a dry place to stay, and that temperatures in the mine were 24?C. He said, however, that evaporation in the mine could expose them to cold.
``As long as they have oxygen and water, they have a chance to survive,'' he said.
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