Rescuers close in on trapped miners

Emergency workers stopped the flow of water into a flooded mine in southern Russia where 13 miners have been trapped for five days, officials said, as drillers came within yards of the men’s presumed location.

Rescuers are tunnelling through solid rock from an adjacent mine to reach the miners. By yesterday morning, the tunnellers were 6ft-10ft 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 plHugged 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, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

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

However, Novoshakhtinsk Mayor Viktor Solntsev said that by 3pm UK time yesterday the tunnel had still not reached the mine, the agency reported.

The rescue teams were working in shifts, emerging from the mine with blackened faces and exhausted-looking eyes. They have tunnelled through about 165ft in four days, compared with the month such a job usually requires, Russian state television reported.

The miners were working some 2,625ft 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.

There were 71 miners working in the mine in the Rostov-on-Don region, about 1,000 600 miles south of Moscow, when the accident occurred. Twenty-five miners managed to escape to other pits and reach the surface after several shafts were flooded.

According to ITAR-Tass, it was the second such accident at the Zapadnaya mine this year. It said water flooded the mine in February, but there were no people inside at the time.

Accidents are common in the Russian coal industry, and miners stage frequent protests over wage delays and declining safety standards. According to the Independent Coal Miners’ Union, 68 miners were killed on the job last year and 98 in 2001.