Fifteen miners were confirmed dead in a flooded coal mine in
central China's Henan Province, rescuers said late
Saturday.
Rescuers recovered 14 bodies of the miners late Saturday evening
who were trapped at the flooded Shangjiuwu coal mine in Ruzhou
City, southwest of the provincial capital Zhengzhou.
A high density of gas and lack of oxygen led to the deaths,
according to Li Jiucheng, director of Henan Coal Mine Safety
Administration.
The accident occurred around 11 PM Thursday when 52 miners were
working inside the mine.
Mine managers organized rescue operation themselves without
reporting the accident immediately to local work safety
administration authorities.
The local government received a report of the accident from
local residents Friday morning and began organizing rescue
operations.
The privately-owned mine had been upgrading production
facilities before the accident. It had won government approval to
raise its annual capacity from 90,000 tons to 150,000 tons.
Police have detained mine owner Wang Xianguo and are searching
for the other two runaway mangers.
The bank account of the mine was also frozen.
The cause of the flood is being investigated.
In a separate accident, a gas blast last Sunday killed 21 miners
at a coal mine in north China's Shanxi Province, a major coal production base
in the country.
China's coal mine accidents killed 4,746 people in 2006,
according to the State Administration of Work Safety.
(Xinhua News Agency March 25, 2007)