Chinese rescuers yesterday drilled deep into the ground in an increasingly desperate bid to save 21 miners trapped for almost two weeks, with one confirmed dead and still no signs of life from more than half of the missing workers, state media reported.
Twenty-two workers were entombed hundreds of meters underground at the Hushan mine near Qixia in eastern China’s Shandong Province after a Jan. 10 explosion sealed the entrance and cut off communications.
Contact has been established with one group of miners, although one, seriously injured in the initial explosion, was confirmed dead late on Wednesday.
Photo: Reuters
Another is believed to be trapped on his own, 100m further down in rising waters, but his condition is unknown as he has not been directly reached by the rescue teams above.
The second group of 11 miners had also yet to be contacted, despite rescuers’ efforts.
“They have also been lowering life detectors and nutrient solutions to other sections to locate the other missing miners, but continued to receive no life signs,” Xinhua news agency reported.
Rescuers on Sunday made contact with a first group of 11 miners at a site about 580m below the surface.
Emergency responders have drilled two “lifeline” channels to deliver food and medicine, and installed a telephone line, while trying to widen a shaft to eventually allow the miners to be extracted.
The workers said they were trapped by “two underground explosions” in the mine, but details are still being confirmed, the China Daily reported yesterday.
There are plans for the widest of the shafts, about the size of a maintenance hole cover, to be broadened enough to extract the miners once drilling is finished, Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television said on Wednesday.
The progress of the rescue has been slow because they are drilling through granite, officials have said, while the extraction could be further complicated by the waterlogged state of the mine.
Rescue teams initially lost precious time as it took more than a day for the incident to be reported.
The local Chinese Communist Party secretary and the mayor have been sacked over the 30-hour delay, and an official investigation is under way to determine the cause of the explosion.
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 stuck underground in the southwestern city of Chongqing.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion