Mexico: President calls on rescuers to ‘do more’ for trapped miners

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“We have to keep working to save the miners. We must continue what we are going to do and do even more,” said the head of state during a visit to the site of the disaster in the state of Coahuila.

Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, yesterday Sunday asked rescue teams to do “more” to save the ten workers who have been trapped dozens of meters below the surface of the earth since Wednesday in the northeastern part of the country, after the collapse and flooding of three coal mine shafts.

“We have to keep working to save the miners. We must continue what we are going to do and do even more,” said the head of state during a visit to the site of the disaster in the state of Coahuila.

“I want it to happen as soon as possible,” he added in front of reporters.

“I’m going to go see how the rescue operation is going. I will go and see the situation with my own eyes”, the president had said before going to the site, in the community of Las Sabinas.

Almost 400 members of rescue crews were yesterday continuing the operation to save the ten workers who were trapped at noon on Wednesday, when the three arcades collapsed and flooded, at a depth of 60 meters.

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.

Repeated accidents

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 16 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 return justice by 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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