Five managed to get out and tell what happened. Authorities try to drain the site.
Next to the coal mine in northern Mexico where ten miners have been trapped for more than three days, the desperation of the relatives grew on Saturday, while the authorities accelerated their efforts to plug the water leaks and thus lower the level of water more quickly. flooding of the wells and rescue divers could enter.
“Today is a decisive day because, according to the technicians, it will be known if there is a possibility that the divers will enter without risk,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Saturday on his official Twitter account.
The president guaranteed that the works were maintained “day and night”.
The workers were trapped Wednesday afternoon in the municipality of Sabinas, in the northern state of Coahuila, when their mine collapsed.
The men ran into an adjoining area full of water, which collapsed causing the flooding of three wells.
Of the 15 miners who were working at the time of the collapse, only five managed to get out and alert the authorities.
Although the possibility of finding them alive seems increasingly remote, the relatives cling to the comments given by some of the survivors and do not lose hope.
“Those who managed to climb and know the terrain said that there was an air pocket in (an area called) La Campana. So, if (the water) swept them to the side of the Bell, there is hope,” said Blanca Rivera, who has two cousins in the mine, on Friday night.
The adjoining wells, 60 meters deep, are connected by underground passageways that were flooded with 34 meters of water. Although there are almost 400 rescuers —military, police and civilians— and extraction pumps that do not stop operating, the level drops very slowly because while the water comes out from one side, it enters from the other.
As explained to the press by the Secretary of Labor of Coahuila, Nazira Zogbi, the priority is to identify where the water is filtering. She said that the strongest hypothesis so far, according to all the engineers and experts on site, is that the leak comes from a nearby mine, which is the one that is being plugged.
The miners who work in this type of shaft usually work without safety measures and without maps and during the excavations they often run into the walls of old mines that are usually full of water, which is why these accidents are common.
As desperation grew, some like Santiago Cecilio Moreno —with his brother and nephew trapped— tried to encourage the rest and were willing to go down with the divers and help the rescue, since he is also a miner.
“I tell the relatives to calm down because we have to wait,” he said. Moreno stressed that, although the military has more experience in diving, he can collaborate because he knows better how to operate down there and he is not afraid.
The authorities assure that sufficient resources are being allocated to the rescue, which since Friday night has been carried out behind some black plastic that protects the area of operations and where only some direct relatives of those trapped enter.
“They tell us one thing and after three hours they tell us another,” Rivera complained. “There is no progress.”
Between June and July of last year there were landslides in two mines in Coahuila in which nine miners perished, but the worst accident in recent history in Mexico was in 2006 at the Pasta de Conchos mine, where 65 miners died in an explosion. Only two bodies were recovered and the rest are still underground.
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