A miner rescued from Zapadnaya Kapitalnaya mine arrives on the surface in Novoshakhtinsk, Russia, Wednesday 29 October 2003. Eleven miners were rescued on Wednesday, one found dead and one is still missing.
PHOTO – TASR/EPA
NOVOSHAKHTINSK, Russia – Eleven Russian miners, trapped for nearly a week after a giant underground lake burst into their shaft in southern Russia, have been found alive, local officials said on Wednesday. One was dead and another was still missing. A Reuters correspondent saw 10 exhausted miners, their faces pitch black and hair covered in grime, emerge from the shaft man after man — some wrapped in blankets, some on stretchers, and some smiling broadly as relatives cried out their names.
Rescuers have yet to bring to the surface the remaining miner found alive in Zapadnaya-Kapitalnaya shaft in Novoshakhtinsk, a small town near the Ukrainian border about 1,000 km south of Moscow.
But just as rescue workers, some with bloodshot eyes from working overnight, were preparing to pull them out from the ageing shaft in the early hours of Wednesday, a methane blast rocked another coal mine in Russia‘s Far East, killing five. The accidents capped a long string of mining disasters in Russia‘s dense network of antiquated and loss-making collieries, some dating back to the years of Josef Stalin‘s mass industrialisation drive in the 1920s or earlier. „Twelve have been located, but one of them is dead, while one is still missing,“ said Kirill Zhitenyov, a local administration official.
The miners have been trapped 1,000 metres below ground since October 23 when floodwaters cut off their air supply and communications and stirred talk they may have died. The rescue operation was much simpler at the other mine — Tsentralnaya — in the Far East, where 66 miners were pulled out to safety within hours after the explosion, officials said. In the Novoshakhtinsk mine, crews have been hewing their way from the adjacent Komsomolskaya Pravda shaft towards a tiny air pocket where the men were believed to have found refuge from the surging lake.
Relatives of those trapped spent a shattering five days outside the mine‘s main entrance in snow and wintry wind, swapping scraps of information. The rescuers, who pulled 33 of the missing miners‘ comrades unharmed from the mine on Saturday, also dumped sand and slag down the shaft to staunch the water inflow. Crews lowered an underwater video camera — the same model used during the futile attempt to rescue the 118 crew members of the sunken submarine Kursk in 2000 — into the shaft.
Officials said the mine would be closed after the accident, leaving the miners, who say they have been paid no wages for seven months, with only one remaining job opportunity in their bleak town of 100,000 — a Soviet-era textiles factory. Reuters
