Rescuers are widening a communication shaft in the hope of extracting a group of Chinese gold miners who have been trapped deep underground for 10 days in rising floodwaters, Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said yesterday.
Twenty-two workers became trapped hundreds of meters underground at the Hushan mine near Qixia in eastern China’s Shandong province when an explosion on Jan. 10 sealed the entrance and cut off communications.
Contact has been made with 11 miners at one location 540m below the surface. Another miner — apparently alone — is trapped 100m farther down.
Photo: AP
After days without any sign of life, a handwritten note was sent up on a metal wire that rescuers had on Sunday dropped into the mine. In it, the miners pleaded for food and medicine, and warned that water levels were high in the damaged mine.
The whereabouts and condition of the other 10 miners are still unknown.
At least four of the miners are injured, their note said.
“One trapped miner was critically injured in the blast and is currently in a coma,” Song Xicheng (宋西成), deputy head of the rescue team, told CCTV.
Rescuers have already dug at least two “lifeline” channels to send food, medicine, paper, pencils and telephones down to the stricken group.
There are plans for the widest of the shafts, about the size of a maintenance hole, to be broadened to extract the miners once drilling is finished, CCTV said.
The progress of the rescue has been slow because they are drilling through granite, an official said, adding that the extraction could be further complicated by the waterlogged state of the mine.
“There is a lot of water in the shaft that may flow in and pose a danger to the trapped workers,” the official said.
Overnight temperatures in Qixia are set to drop below freezing during the next week.
Currently, the group is recovering strength after supplies reached them, rescuers said.
Several waterproof backup phones were sent down to the trapped miners after they wrote a second note on Tuesday, saying that earlier phones were damaged, Xinhua news agency reported.
Rescue teams lost precious time as it took more than a day for the accident to be reported, China Youth Daily said, citing provincial authorities.
The local Chinese Communist Party secretary and the Qixia mayor have been sacked over the 30-hour delay, and an official investigation is under way to determine the cause of the explosion.
The hashtag “Shandong trapped miners sent another note” received more than 170 million views on the Sina Weibo social network by yesterday morning, as Chinese began to take notice of the extraordinary rescue effort.
Mining accidents are common in China, where the industry has a poor safety record and regulations are often weakly enforced.
Last month, 23 workers died after being trapped underground in the southwestern city of Chongqing, just months after 16 others died from carbon monoxide poisoning after being trapped underground at another coal mine in the city.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS