At least 10 miners remain trapped since Wednesday in a coal mine in the city of Sabinas, Mexico, Mexican authorities confirmed. Another five have already been evacuated, but are injured. According to a statement from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, the workers were surprised by a flood that trapped them in the mine, which has been in operation since January. The alert was given by a miner who managed to escape.
More than 90 Mexican soldiers participate in the rescue tasks, along with members of Civil Protection and six experts from the special forces of the National Guard, but the work carried out for more than 20 hours last Thursday was unsuccessful. According to El Pais, a military plan developed to help the population in case of crisis — the DN-III. Water extraction pumps have already been installed next to the mine.
At a press conference, Laura Velázquez, coordinator of Civil Protection, explained that the miners were in gallery number 1, where they worked with manual tools, when they were trapped by a flood of 34 meters of water. To get to its location, “you have to go down three wells.”
“Right now the important thing is that the bombs that Conagua sent us are being located, which are helping us a lot. We are strategically placing bombs in each of these wells. to be able to extract the greatest amount of water and have immediate access to the mines and rescue the miners as quickly as possible,” Laura Velázquez described, quoted by CNN México. According to the local newspaper Zócalo, the pumps, which have about 150 horsepower, only extract 1.49 meters of water per hour.
The excavation is located in the village of Agujita, in the area known as Conchas, in the state of Coahuila. In this region of Mexico, 99% of the coal explored in the country is extracted. According to the Spanish newspaper, 3,000 families depend directly on this industry; and between 2000 and 2020 alone, 2,626 were disabled due to mining work. In June 2021, seven miners died after being trapped in a collapsed shaft. And in February 2006, an explosion filled a mine with gas, killing 65 of the 73 workers on the site.
Miguel Ángel Riquelme Solís, governor of the state of Coahuila, explained to Diario de Coahuila that “each mine presents particular situations” and that the case is not comparable to that of the summer of last year. “Different equipment and studies are needed, here the plans were not updated and there was no idea where to gothe footprints and the conditions of the mine did not come out”, he justified.
Source: Observadora
