203 killed in a Gas Explosion in Chinese Mine

A gas explosion in a coal mine in China’s northeast killed at least 203 miners, the Chinese government said Tuesday, in the deadliest such disaster reported since 1949. Xinhua, China’s main government-run news agency, said the explosion at the Sujiawan colliery of the Fuxin coal industry group in Fuxin occurred about 800 feet below ground.

A rescue operation was immediately started, as well as an investigation of the cause of the explosion. The explosion, which occurred on Monday afternoon at the mine in Fuxin city, injured 22 miners and 13 were still trapped, the official Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday. A rescue team of more than 180 miners were working to free the trapped workers.

We have never seen such as big accident before,” said an official at Fuxin’s Coalmine Safety Supervision Bureau who gave his surname as Hu. The rescue operations are still going on and the coal mine is still verifying the conditions of workers,” he said. “We still don’t know the real cause of the accident because the formal investigation has yet to start. Provincial and national leaders had arrived at the scene, he said.

An official at Fuxin Coal Industry Group declined to confirm the official death toll. The 22 injured workers were taken to a hospital attached to the coal mining group, a hospital official said. “Most of them are slightly injured, but one of them is suffering from external head trauma,” she said.

The explosion Monday afternoon at the Sunjiawan mine in Liaoning province also injured 22 miners and trapped 13 underground, China’s Xinhua News Agency reported.
China has suffered a string of deadly mining disasters in recent months, despite a national safety crackdown. A blast in northern China’s Shaanxi province in November killed 166 miners. Another explosion in October killed 148. Before that, the deadliest recent reported mining accident was a fire in southern China that killed 162 miners in 2000.