Rescuers blast through rock to save 11 of 13 trapped miners

SEARCH crews blasted through solid rock to rescue 11 of 13 coal miners who emerged covered in soot yesterday after six days trapped in a deep shaft in southern Russia.

One miner died underground and another remained missing, emergency officials said.

Rescuers reached the men yesterday morning after drillers punched through to the pit face where the miners had sought refuge following a flood. Entering the chamber, the rescuers found a note scrawled on a ventilation pipe, showing in which direction the miners had moved, NTV television reported.

“The guys looked fine for people who have been trapped in a mine for six days. They came out themselves,” said Alexander Smetalin, one of the rescuers. “They were found in the northern part of the mine. They were lying there all together.”

Smetalin said that the miners had climbed an incline in the shaft in the Zapadnaya mine that kept them above the level of the icy water. The missing miner apparently had left the others in hopes of finding a way out, and rescuers were continuing to search for him, said officials.

In spite of their ordeal, most of the miners walked out of the shaft on their own after being carried or led about 1.5 miles underground, emergency officials said. Black dust coated their faces and thick blankets were draped over their shoulders.

As the miners emerged from the shaft, relatives who had kept vigil outside the mine cried out their names. Doctors, policemen and rescue workers surrounded the men who were hustled into waiting ambulances, and some reached out to pat the miners on the back in a restrained show of relief. The last live miner was carried out of the shaft on a stretcher shortly after noon. Rescue workers said he apparently was suffering from exposure, but was conscious and responsive.

According to reports, the director of the mine, Vasily Avdeyev, who was among those trapped, had survived. Rescuers carried out the body of the dead miner, Sergei Voytinok, last.

Russian Orthodox priests had accompanied the body on the final leg of the journey to the surface, reciting prayers for the dead as the shaft elevator rose.

As the rescue operation unfolded in southern Russia early Wednesday, five miners were killed in a mine explosion in the Primorye region of the Russian Far East.

Sixty-six other miners were rescued after the blast in the town of Partizansk, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry. The blast was due to a build-up of methane and was blamed on lax safety practices, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

After learning of the rescue and the Far East blast, President Vladimir Putin told a Kremlin meeting that to his regret, mine accidents in Russia “were taking on a systematic character”.

The men who were rescued from the Zapadnaya mine were among 71 working some 2,625 feet below ground on Thursday when water from a subterranean lake leaked into a shaft above them, blocking their way to the surface.

Twenty-five managed to escape, and 33 other miners trapped by the flood were rescued Saturday. Emergency workers had blasted and drilled through solid rock from an adjacent mine to reach the miners.

Meanwhile, hundreds of tons of rock, soil and reinforced concrete pillars had been dumped in the shaft to stanch the flood.

According to ITAR-Tass, it was the second such accident at the southern Russian mine this year.