CHINA:Rescuers said 181 coal miners trapped in flooded shafts in eastern China had only slim hopes of survival, as they raced to pump water out of the mines inundated by a rain-swollen river.
Officials in the mine near Xintai said they would continue with their desperate efforts to find the men after one of the country's worst mine disasters. China's mining industry is the world's deadliest.
Water levels were rising, work areas were submerged and the miners "had only slim chances of survival," said Wang Ziqi, director of Shandong's coal mine safety agency.
Operations in other mines in Shandong province have been stopped as a precaution, but angry relatives said it was too little too late and that work should have been stopped days earlier once the seriousness of the flooding was clear.
In recent days, 200mm of rain have fallen in Xintai city, which is 570km southeast of Beijing. The flooding started on Friday afternoon, when 756 miners were working underground.
Thousands of soldiers and local residents sealed up a 50m breach in the levee on the Wenhe river with sandbags and cement bags on Sunday - at one point they used a turned-over truck to block the gap, but by then water had almost completely filled the mine.
"As of noon on the 18th the water had risen to within 20 metres of the mine opening," said Zhang Dekuan, a Shangdong government spokesman.
Coal is a primary energy source in China to fuel the burgeoning economy and with prices riding high these days, some operators ignore safety rules in the interest of higher production.
China's mines have improved in recent years since the government stepped up its efforts to shut illegal small mines and improve safety in state-owned mines, but it remains a dangerous profession.
In the first seven months of this year, accidents have killed 2,163 coal miners in 1,320 accidents. In 2006, 4,746 people were killed in thousands of blasts, floods and other mining accidents.
China's worst mine disaster was in 2005, when a gas explosion killed 214 miners in the country's northeast.
The Xintai mine went bankrupt three years ago when it was a state firm. It was bought up by Huayuan, a private company.
Before rescue teams can enter the shafts they must first pump out 10 million cubic metres of water.
Earlier this month, all 69 miners trapped in a flooded coal mine in central China's Henan Province for three days were rescued in one of the most successful rescue operations in coal mine accidents in China.