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Coal mine blast kills 64, 84 still trapped
Rescuers have found another two bodies underground the Daping coal mine in central China's Henan Province, bringing the death toll in Wednesday's gas blast to 64.
The two bodies were found at 10:00 a.m. Friday. Rescue work for the other 84 missing was continuing. Rescuers have reduced the average gas density to normal and repaired a major passageway overnight to speed up the flows of rescuers and rescue vehicles, said Li Hongshan, an official in charge of production at Daping coal mine. Large areas of short circuits north of the passageway are yet to be repaired and two more locations still report high gas density due to ventilation failures. The monitoring system at the rescue headquarters showed at 7:22 a.m. Friday that communication was yet to resume at several locations in the mine. At 9:20 a.m., four trucks of cable were delivered to the mine by the Pingmei Group to replace what had been destroyed in the blast. The blast occurred 10:10 p.m. Wednesday when 446 miners were working in the mine of Zhengmei Group located in Xinmi. Two hundred and ninety-eight miners managed to escape after the blast happened, while the rest were trapped underground. The provincial government quickly organized the rescue operation while a 14-member working team of the State Council, headed by Secretary-General of the State Council Hua Jianmin, arrived at the mine Thursday afternoon. Local source said the trapped miners are mostly from Henan Province, and that the survival chance for the missing is quite slim. All the injured, including four severely cases, were sent to the General Hospital affiliated with the Zhengzhou Coal Industry Group. A detailed casualty list has not yet been made available.
At the office building of the Daping Coal Mine, bodies of victims were covered with green canvas awaiting identification, the Xinhua News Agency said. "So many patients were sent to the hospital at one blow, the number of the doctors and nurses on duty was not enough. Therefore we had to call all doctors, nurses, logistics and office staff to take part in the medical care," said a nurse from the hospital, who declined to give her name. "We have continued working, some of us are too busy to eat anything," she said. Some of the professors and chief physicians came from as far as the College of Medicine at Zhengzhou University and many other larger hospitals in Henan Province. An official at the hospital said many of the injured miners suffered smoke inhalation or skin lacerations when they escaped. When I saw these patients they were all black. It was hard to distinguish their original appearance," a nurse recalled of the chaos. "We helped them to clean their bodies and changed their clothes into new and clean underwear, 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 chat with some of the lightly injured patients... most of them didn't want to recall the tragic panic of the disaster," she said. At the scene, most of the patients are already out of danger, but the doctors and nurses are still closely watching for sudden changes. Located under the Songshan Mountain, 40 kilometres to the southwest of Zhengzhou, the State-owned Daping Coal Mine had 4,100 employees. Put into operation in 1986, the mine had annual coal production of 1.3
million tons. The accident was the deadliest coal mine disaster by far this year, Sun said. He said that a special team with SAWS leadership has been sent to the site of the blast. The density of the gas underground should be closely monitored while rescue efforts continue. In another accident in Southwest China's Chongqing, six miners died and seven other were missing after a gas leak in a grim reminder that the world's biggest mining industry is also the most dangerous, with thousands of people killed in explosions, floods and other mishaps every year. Work safety officials have racked their brains for ways to reduce the death toll from mining accidents through the closure of small-scale unsafe, illegal mines and raising safety standards. However, lured by the profits, many small mine owners and local officials have quietly re-opened dangerous pits in many places in recent years. Sun said SAWS will co-operate with labour supervision departments to actively implement insurance systems for industrial injuries. He also urged enterprises themselves to shoulder responsibility for accidents and protect the life and property rights for their employees through insurance. China has put forward special laws on insurance for industrial injuries, which, however, have been carried out in an "unbalanced" way throughout the country, he said. The overall work safety situation has been improved this year, Sun noted.
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