Rescue underway for 4 Chinese miners trapped for 36 days

Four miners who had been trapped underground for 36 days in a collapsed Chinese gypsum mine in east China’s Shandong Province have been rescued, Xinhua reported Friday (Jan 29).

File – Rescuers try to contact the trapped people at a collapsed mine in Pingyi County, east China’s Shandong Province on December 28, 2015. In 2014, 931 people were killed in mine accidents in China, drastically down from the year 2002, when almost 7,000 miners died.

Rescuers extracted the workers after drilling two access tunnels, the official Xinhua news agency reports. Cheers broke out as the dazed miner was carefully guided to solid ground, where he was embraced by fellow miners in helmets and orange uniforms.

Seventeen men became trapped when the mine collapsed on December 25, four of them were rescued and one was pronounced dead on December 30.

For several weeks, they were tunnelling down to the surviving men, and water and liquids were passed down through a narrow borehole. One of them was heard saying: “I feel relieved and secure now”.

Rescuers had been preparing to use a man-size capsule to extract the four, similar to a method used in 2010 to rescue 33 miners trapped in a Chilean mine for more than two months.

The first was pulled out around 9: 20 p.m.in a capsule.