Rescuers close in on trapped Russian miners

Emergency workers today stopped the flow of water into a flooded Russian coal mine where 13 men have been trapped for five days as drillers came within yards of the men’s presumed location.

Rescuers are tunnelling through solid rock from an adjacent mine to reach the men.

By this morning, the rescuers were six to 10 feet away from the area where the men are believed to have been stranded by the flood of icy water, said Major General Viktor Kapkanchikov of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry.

Andrei Khudyakov, the leader of rescuers at the Zapadnaya mine in Novoshakhtinsk, said his team had plugged the hole through which water had flowed into the shaft. Hundreds of tons of rock, soil and reinforced concrete pillars had been dumped into the shaft to seal the leak.

“Maybe we’ll punch through and find them standing there, alive,” Khudyakov said.

He said rescuers were carrying video equipment to help them map out approaches to the trapped men. The rescue teams were working in shifts, emerging from the mine with blackened faces and exhausted-looking eyes.

They have tunnelled through about 165 feet in four days, compared with the month such a job usually requires.

The miners were working 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. On Saturday, 33 other miners who had been trapped by the flood were rescued.

Alexander Kornichenko, the deputy chairman of the Russian mine safety authority, said rescue officials believed the miners had found a dry place to stay, and that temperatures in the mine were 24 C (75 F). He said, however, that evaporation in the mine could expose them to cold.

“As long as they have oxygen and water, they have a chance to survive,” he said.

There were 71 miners working in the mine in the Rostov-on-Don region, about 600 miles south of Moscow, when the accident occurred.