China finds more bodies in mine collapse, 48 still missing

Back­hoes and exca­va­tors have been used by res­cue work­ers to dig up tons of dirt and debris to search for 48 miss­ing peo­ple after an open-pit mine col­lapsed in north­ern Chi­na. State broad­cast­er CCTV report­ed that the dis­as­ter had killed five people.

The sit­u­a­tion on the ground remains dan­ger­ous, with a sec­ond land­slide at a mega-site in the Arqsa dis­trict of Inner Mon­go­lia, forc­ing the search to halt for sev­er­al hours.

More than a dozen bull­doz­ers, trucks, SUVs and fire trucks were seen pass­ing a police check­point about 25 kilo­me­ters south­west of the mine on Thurs­day afternoon.

Police stopped near­ly all per­son­nel to check whether they had access per­mits before allow­ing them to con­tin­ue on the road lead­ing to the mine.

“Only those with gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion can enter the area,” said a police offi­cer. Peo­ple who live near the mine are said to be forced to stay in near­by villages.

Around 1 p.m. Wednes­day, one of the shaft walls first col­lapsed, bury­ing peo­ple and min­ing trucks under tons of rock and sand. About five hours lat­er, anoth­er col­lapse occurred, and work was forced to stop.

The cause of this dis­as­ter is still under investigation.

About 900 res­cue work­ers with heavy equip­ment entered the scene and resumed the search on Thurs­day morn­ing, accord­ing to the Xin­hua News Agency.

Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping called on Chi­na to “do its utmost in search and res­cue”, “ensure the safe­ty of peo­ple’s lives and prop­er­ty, and main­tain the sta­bil­i­ty of soci­ety as a whole”.

Footage of the col­lapse, broad­cast by CCTV, shows a mas­sive wall of rub­ble slam­ming down on peo­ple and vehi­cles below from the hillside.

Inner Mon­go­lia Xin­jing Soot and Chem­i­cals Co., Ltd., which oper­at­ed the mine, last year faced mul­ti­ple inci­dents, includ­ing unsafe tun­nel entrances, dan­ger­ous stor­age of volatiles, and lack of train­ing for safe­ty per­son­nel, accord­ing to news site The Paper. He was fined for a safe­ty violation.

Inner Mon­go­lia is an impor­tant area for min­ing coal, var­i­ous min­er­als and rare earths, which crit­ics say has dev­as­tat­ed the region’s land­scape of moun­tains, grass­lands and deserts.

Chi­na, which relies heav­i­ly on coal for pow­er gen­er­a­tion, has sought to reduce the num­ber of mine fatal­i­ties by plac­ing greater empha­sis on safe­ty and clos­ing small­er mines that lack the nec­es­sary equipment.

In recent months, how­ev­er, Chi­na has seen a spate of fatal­i­ties in indus­try and con­struc­tion as a result of poor safe­ty edu­ca­tion and reg­u­la­tions, bureau­crat­ic cor­rup­tion and a ten­den­cy for com­pa­nies to cut costs to make a profit.

Despite these high-pro­file inci­dents, the total num­ber of indus­tri­al acci­dents in 2022, when much of Chi­na’s econ­o­my had come to a stand­still under a “zero acci­dent” pol­i­cy, fell 27% from the pre­vi­ous year, the Min­istry of Cri­sis and Risk Man­age­ment said last month. Announced. The min­istry said the num­ber of deaths from such acci­dents fell by 23.6%.