More than 70 killed, 100 injured in mine blast in China (3rd Roundup)

Feb 22, 2009, 14:44 GMT

A woman who lost her husband in the mine blast, weeps in the arms of another crying woman in Gujiao city in north China\'s Shanxi province 22 February 2009. EPA/LRG

Beijing - A gas explosion killed at least 74 miners and injured more than 100 at a coal mine in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi on Sunday, the government and state media said.

The blast ripped through the Tunlan coal mine belonging to the state-owned Shanxi Coking Coal Group in Gujiao city at about 2 am as 436 miners were working underground, the State Administration of Work Safety reported on its website.

The death toll rose to 74 at 6 pm, with five of the injured miners in a critical condition, China's official Xinhua news agency reported as rescue operations concluded.

The semi-official China News Service had earlier reported 73 dead and 21 in critical condition in local hospitals. Initial reports had also said 327 miners were rescued and about 35 apparently still missing.

Sixteen hours after the explosion, however, rescue headquarters said all miners had been found, according to Xinhua.

'The focus of our effort has shifted from searching and rescue to medical treatment,' provincial Communist Party committee chief, who was in charge of rescue operations, was quoted as saying.

Hospitals in Gujiao and the nearby provincial capital of Taiyuan, treated over 100 injured miners.

Most of the injured miners had suffered carbon monoxide poisoning, the official Xinhua news agency quoted doctors at Gujiao's Xishan Coal and Electricity Hospital as saying.

Survivor Xue Huancheng, 27, told the state Xinhua news agency, 'We didn't feel anything unusual before the accident this morning.'

Xue said that at around 3:30 am, after the initial explosion, the ventilation system in the mine broke down and that the miners were then ordered to evacuate.

'At that time power supply underground was cut off and we had to walk,' said Xue, who fainted from lack of oxygen shortly before he reached the exit of the mine.

Another of the hospitalized survivors, Li Chengsheng, 35, said: 'I felt I could not breathe at around 2:30 am and soon we were told to evacuate the shaft.'

He also told Xinhua: 'Half an hour later, the small was becoming so strong and the thick smoke in the shaft prevented me from seeing people a dozen metres away.'

More than 80 rescue specialists searched underground following the explosion and more were later dispatched, the news agency quoted the local rescue headquarters as saying.

Hospitals in Taiyuan had prepared 68 hyperbaric oxygen chambers for treating injured miners, while more than 40 ambulances were sent to the mine.

The large state-run mine has an annual capacity of 5 million tons of coal, the safety administration said.

Safety inspectors and senior officials had travelled to the mine to investigate the cause of the explosion, it said.

Accidents kill an estimated 10,000 people annually in Chinese mines. The accidents are often triggered by outdated equipment and poor safety measures with many occurring at illegal mines.

Mountainous Shanxi province is one of China's biggest coal-producing regions, with hundreds of state-run, private and illegal mines employing tens of thousands of miners, many of them migrants from other areas.