Nearly 400 members of rescue teams were yesterday continuing the operation to save ten workers who were trapped at noon on Wednesday when three tunnels of a coal mine collapsed and flooded at a depth of 60 meters in the state of Coahuila (northeast).
The president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, went yesterday Sunday to the coal mine where a disaster unfolded last Wednesday, as rescue teams continue efforts to bring out alive the workers trapped tens of meters deep.
“I’m going to go see how the rescue operation is going. I will go and see the situation with my own eyes,” explained the head of state before arriving at the point, where he did not make statements to the press.
Nearly 400 members of rescue teams were yesterday continuing the operation to save ten workers who were trapped at noon on Wednesday when three tunnels of a coal mine collapsed and flooded at a depth of 60 meters in the state of Coahuila (northeast).
The president said that Saturday was a “decisive” day for the rescue operation: “we will find out if there is a possibility that the divers can enter (the mine) without danger”.
But the divers were unable to enter the galleries yesterday, as the water level (34 meters) only dropped to 9.5 meters.
The divers “say they don’t know when” they will be able to dive, Alicia Huerta, the niece of one of the trapped miners, told AFP.
Rescue crews use about twenty pumps. Experts fear, however, that the water level may rise, due to flow from a neighboring mine.
On Saturday night, relatives attended a church service near the makeshift camp where they have been staying since Wednesday, not far from the zone where the rescue operation is underway — cordoned off by authorities.
The state of Coahuila, the only one where coal is mined in Mexico, is used to such tragedies. In June 2021, seven workers died due to the collapse of an underground gallery.
On February 19, 2006, 65 miners were killed when gas accumulated in a pocket exploded in Pasta de Conchos, a mine owned by the Grupo México consortium.
Sixteen years later, 63 of the 65 bodies still lie in its galleries.
For sixteen years now, families have been “asking for measures” to prevent such tragedies, but “their pleas are not being heard,” said the Society of Jesus—Mexico’s Jesuit order—assuring that it is accompanying the relatives in their quest to find justice in international institutions.
In October 2010 in Chile, 33 workers miraculously emerged alive from the depths of a copper mine, 700 meters below the surface of the earth in the Atacama desert, after 69 days of being trapped due to a collapse.
RES-EMP
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