At presstime, 33 Russian miners trapped 800 metres underground had been rescued from the flooded Zapadnaya coal mine, about 1,000 km south of Moscow. However, 13 miners remain unaccounted for.
The miners were working in a shaft when a makeshift dam that had been stemming the flow of water into the mine suddenly gave way. The flood cut power and put a lift out of action.
The water broke in from 200 metres underground and was still flowing into the mine at presstime.
Rescuers were trying to break into the mine from an adjacent underground shaft. As many as 800 people were involved in the rescue effort.
“To our estimation, there are twenty-three to twenty-four metres left for the rescuers to pass to get to the trapped miners,” Alexander Kornichenko, the deputy chairman of the Russian mine safety authority, told The Associated Press.
A representative of the Russian government promised the equivalent of US$400 to each survivor. The miners have not been paid since March.
In June, 11 workers died when a mine shaft collapsed in Russia’s Kuzbass field in Siberia, and in post-Soviet Russia’s worst such disaster, more than 60 miners died when a methane explosion ripped through a Siberian pit in December 1997.
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