Sixty-four miners are confirmed dead as of Friday morningand
hopes for survival of the 84 still stranded underground are slim in
the aftermath of a gas explosion at the Daping Coal Mine. The
tragedy occurred near Xinmi City in central China's Henan
Province.
More than 1,000 rescue workers are laboring around the clock to
reach the trapped miners, but the high density of toxic gas inside
the mine is hampering efforts, local sources say.
The blast occurred at 10:10 PM Wednesday. A gas monitoring
system shows that just minutes earlier, gas density increased from
1.5 percent to 40 percent throughout mine.
A total of 446 miners were inside the mine when the accident
occurred. Eighteen of the 298 who managed to escape were injured --
four of them seriously -- while the rest were trapped
underground.
As of?10:00 AM?Friday, the confirmed death toll
had risen to 64, at least 55 of whom died from
suffocation.
A sign over the entrance to the pit says, "Safety First."
The provincial government organized the rescue operation. A
local source said most of the trapped miners are from Henan
Province.
A 14-member task force of the State Council headed by
Secretary-General Hua Jianmin arrived at the mine Thursday
afternoon.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao directed the
provincial and local governments to spare no effort to save the
trapped miners, determine the cause of the accident and deal with
the aftermath.
At the office of the Daping Coal Mine, bodies of victims were
covered with green canvas awaiting identification, according to the
Xinhua News Agency.
All of the injured miners were sent to the general hospital
affiliated with the Zhengzhou Coal Industry Group Corp., a
state-owned enterprise that owns the Daping Mine.
Hospital officials refused to give journalists access to the
facility or to grant interviews, other than stating that many of
the injured miners suffered smoke inhalation or skin lacerations
when they escaped.
Zhang Peifang, a neurologist who came out of retirement to help
in the emergency, said that four of the injured men were burned,
nine had been overcome by gas and five had only skin wounds.
He stated that the most seriously injured man suffered severe
burns and multiple fractures and lacerations of the legs and skull.
The patient was in satisfactory condition following surgery.
One nurse, who declined to give her name, said, "So many
patients were sent to the hospital at one time, there weren't
enough doctors and nurses on duty. So we had to call all doctors,
nurses, logistics and office staff to help give medical care."
Those who came to help included professors and department heads
from the College of Medicine at Zhengzhou University and other
large hospitals in Henan.
"When I saw the patients they were all black. It was hard
to distinguish their original appearance," a nurse recalled of the
chaos. "We helped them to clean up and change into clean new
clothes, which were brought in by logistics staff after the
patients arrived."
"Some of the patients can't eat by themselves, so we feed them
meals and water," she said. "We chatted with some of the less
seriously injured patients . . . most of them didn't want to recall
the panic of the disaster," she said.
Located at Songshan Mountain, 40 kilometers southwest of
Zhengzhou, the Daping Coal Mine had 4,100 employees. Put into
operation in 1986, the mine produces about 1.3 million tons of coal
annually.
This is the third mining accident reported in the Xinmi area in
the past six months. Last April, 12 workers were trapped
underground for 109 hours by flooding in Zhengzhou Coal Industry's
Chaohua Mine, also in Xinmi. All 12 survived. On September 23, a
gas explosion at a smaller, privately owned mine left at least
seven miners dead.
Every year, gas explosions, cave-ins and flooding kill thousands
of miners in China. The State Administration of Work Safety reports
that in the first nine months of 2004, 4,153 people died in mining
accidents. Official figures for 2003 put the total deaths in mining
accidents at 6,702.
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(Xinhua News Agency, China Daily October 22, 2004)
