Dozens of rescuers battled Thursday to free 10 workers trapped in a flooded coal mine in northern Mexico, where desperate relatives waited for news more than 24 hours after a cave-in. As night fell again in Coahuila state, family members cried and comforted each other while hopes of finding survivors dimmed with each passing hour.
“What we want is for them to retrieve the bodies,” Angelica Montelongo said with a sad and tired look, before summoning up new hope that her brother Jaime would be rescued. But hey, God willing, right? You have to have faith that they’re alive,” she said.
Soldiers, emergency workers and rescue dogs were deployed to the mine in Agujita in the municipality of Sabinas after the latest disaster to strike Mexico’s main coal-producing region. What I want with all my soul is that we rescue the miners,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters in Mexico City.
“We must not lose faith. We must not lose hope,” he added.
Time is crucial here,” she said. Authorities said the mine’s three shafts descended 60 meters (200 feet) and the floodwater inside was 34 meters deep.
“It’s complicated,” Velazquez said. But the authorities were making progress and pumping out water “to rescue the miners as soon as possible,” she added. Around 230 army and other government personnel were sent to the site, about 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) north of Mexico City, the defense ministry said.
Experts and relatives painted a picture of a precarious profession fraught with risks extracting coal from the mines with lax safety standards.
“There’s always job insecurity… and danger,” said Blasa Maribel Navarro, whose cousin Sergio Cruz has mined coal for several years to support his two daughters. Navarro said she was still hopeful of seeing him alive “because we trust in God.”
Crudely constructed mines like the one that collapsed lack concrete reinforcements to protect workers from a cave-in, engineering expert Guillermo Iglesias said. The miners “dig a shaft two meters in circumference and keep digging until they reach a small layer of coal,” he told local radio.
Source: eNCA
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