Mexican authorities on Monday announced a new strategy to rescue 10 miners who have been missing for 12 days in a flooded mine, after a sudden rise in water levels hampered rescue efforts and hopes on Sunday.
This sudden rise in the level of the water, patiently pumped for more than a week to allow the rescuers to descend underground, has aggravated the desperation of the relatives of the miners who have shown no signs of life since August 3.
In one of the three wells that rescuers expected to enter this weekend, the level was 38 meters on Monday, compared to 1.3 meters early Sunday, said the coordinator of the National Civil Defense, Laura Velázquez.
This level is even higher than the day after the accident at the El Pinabete mine, located in the state of Coahuila (north), the main producer of coal in Mexico. The new strategy is to try to plug the seepage of water from the neighboring, much larger and abandoned Conchas Norte mine, by drilling 20 wells 60 meters deep to inject cement, explained Laura Velázquez.
Named mine owners
Authorities believe that during the excavation work, the miners accidentally reached the nearby flooded mine.
“We are not going to stop our efforts to save the miners,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters.
On Friday, authorities announced that rescuers were about to inspect the mine after successful pumping operations. But dim hopes that relatives slept in a campsite adjacent to the search area have been dashed.
The latter demand that the owners of the mine be held responsible: “it is a crime that cannot go unpunished,” said Magdalena Montelongo, sister of Jaime, one of the miners caught in the trap.
Coahuila, Mexico’s main coal-producing region, has seen a number of fatal mining accidents over the years. The worst happened at the Pasta de Conchos mine in 2006 when a gas explosion killed 65 miners.
Source: BFM TV
