Four days on, efforts to rescue Assam coal miners hindered by floodwater
Six workers are still trapped in the mine while the bodies of two others, whose deaths were confirmed by the state government, are yet to be recovered.
Operations to rescue workers trapped inside a 300-foot deep coal mine in Assam’s Dima Hasao district entered their fourth day on Thursday with no success so far, reported PTI.
Officials from the Navy, Army, National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Coal India and the district administration are collaborating on the rescue.
On Thursday, Inspector Roshan Kumar Singh, commander of the National Disaster Response Force team, said that despite efforts to drain water using heavy pumps and scan the vertical shaft using sonar equipment, not much progress had been made in locating the trapped workers due to the amount of water still trapped in the mine.
A remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, was deployed in the mine in the early morning after some of the floodwater was drained overnight.
“So far, nothing has been detected by the ROV,” an unidentified Assam Police official told PTI. “It is trying very hard to locate the trapped miner despite the extremely hostile and difficult situation. The water inside is totally blackened and it is creating problems in finding anything.”
Four Navy deep divers entered the flooded shaft to help locate the trapped miners, the Assam Police official said.
At least nine workers were trapped in the illegal rat hole mine on Monday due to sudden flooding that left them no time to escape. About 15 labourers were present in the mine when an underground water source was accidentally breached, flooding the shaft and tunnels.
On Wednesday, the body of one of the nine missing workers was recovered from 85 feet below the earth by Army divers. The victim was identified as Ganga Bahadur Srestho from Udaypur district of Nepal.
Six workers are still trapped in the mine while the bodies of another two, who were confirmed dead by the state government on Tuesday, are yet to be recovered.
Coal India sent a heavy pressure pump from Maharashtra with a capacity of 500 gallons per minute, which arrived at Silchar airport, PTI quoted an unidentified official as saying.
A helicopter will transport the pump’s parts in several sorties for assembly at the site. “Already five to six pumps are working, but heavy siltation in water is creating problems for the pumps,” the official said. “We now need heavy submersible pumps and it is being arranged.”
National Disaster Response Force officer Kuldeep Sharma said that the workers were in the rat holes connected to the central pit of the mine when it got flooded.
Rat-hole mining has been banned in Meghalaya since 2014. It is considered to be an unscientific and dangerous technique in which workers enter deep tunnels around three or four feet high to extract coal. However, numerous instances of the practice have since been recorded across the North East, including in Assam.
