Blast kills 9 miners, 28 feared dead

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Blast kills 9 miners, 28 feared dead

An explosion occurred Monday morning in a coal mine in Heilongjiang Province of Northeast China, killing at least nine workers while 28 are still missing and believed to be dead.

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An explosion occurred Monday morning in a coal mine in Heilongjiang Province of Northeast China, killing at least nine workers while 28 are still missing and believed to be dead.

The accident happened at 6:10 am when 37 workers were working in Baixing Coal Mine owned by Jixi Mining Group, a State-owned enterprise with about 70,000 employees.

The explosion left serious damage to the underground tunnels. Toxic carbon monoxide gas remained at high concentrations and temperature were at about 50 C after the accident, according to the State Administration of Work Safety.

A rescue team in full gear, including oxygen masks, was sent down into the mine twice by about 5 pm. and found nine bodies.

"The rest of the workers are unlikely to survive, because of the high concentrations of toxic gas,'' Tian Guiyou, an official with local work safety bureau in Jixi told China Daily.

The rescue effort was to continue through the night, however, he said.

The administration sent a special team, headed by its Deputy Director Liang Jiakun, to investigate the accident. It was to have arrived in Jixi by late last night.

It is not the first time Jixi, a mountainous city bordering Russia, has hit the national headlines for accidents in its coal mines.

On June 20, 2002, an accident claimed 124 lives, including the Jixi Mining Group's General President Zhao Wenlin.

The group once put out 20 million tons of coal in 1991, ranking it within the country's top 10.

The coal mining industry contributes up to 40 per cent of Jixi's local GDP and supports about half of the city's population.

But the pillar industry has been losing ground the past few years as costs have grown higher its traditional market has been invaded by powerful competitors in Shanxi Province.

As a result, many medium and small-sized coal mines in Jixi that engaged in abusive mining aimed at fast money and ignored safety standards have been closed.

Source: China Daily

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