Hundreds killed in China gas blast
SHANGHAI, China – A gas explosion in a coal mine in China’s northeast killed at least 203 miners, the government said today, in the deadliest such disaster reported since communist rule began in 1949.
The explosion Monday afternoon at the Sunjiawan mine in Liaoning province also injured 22 others and trapped 13 underground, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The cause of the blast, which occurred 794 feet underground, was under investigation, it said.
President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders issued orders for local officials “to spare no effort to rescue those stranded in the mine,” Xinhua said. It said they called for “strict measures” to prevent any more such disasters.
China has suffered a string of deadly mining disasters in recent months despite a nationwide safety crackdown.
A blast in the northern province of Shaanxi 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.
The disaster Monday was the deadliest reported by the Chinese government since the 1949 communist revolution. However, until the late 1990s, when the government began regularly announcing statistics on mining deaths, many industrial accidents were never disclosed.
In 1942, China’s northeast was the scene of the world’s deadliest coal mining disaster when an accident killed 1,549 miners in Japanese-occupied Manchuria during World War II.
The explosion at Sunjiawan happened about 10 minutes after an earthquake shook the mine, Xinhua said, citing Zhang Yunfu, vice general manager of the Fuxin mine group.
A duty officer at the provincial Safety Production Supervision Bureau said she had no details and directed queries to the department in charge of coal mines. Calls to that department and others were not answered.
An official at the Fuxin Coal Industry (Group) Company said he was too busy to comment.
China’s mines are by far the world’s deadliest, with more than 6,000 deaths last year in floods, explosions and fires.
The government said that toll was 8 percent below the number killed the previous year. But the government says China’s fatality rate per ton of coal mined is still 100 times that of the United States.
China says it accounted for 80 percent of all coal mining deaths worldwide last year. Mine owners and local officials are frequently blamed for putting profits ahead of safety, especially as the nation’s soaring energy needs increase demand for coal.