Nearly 400 rescuers are mobilized to try to save the ten men trapped by 60 meters deep, half of whom were flooded.
Le Monde with AFP
The president of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador asked on Sunday August 7, for help to make it “more” to save the ten minors stuck underground since Wednesday in northeast Mexico following the collapse and flooding of three coal wells.
“We must continue to work to save minors. We must continue to do what we are doing and even more,” said the president during a visit to the accident in Agujita In the locality of Las Sabinas, in the State of Coahuila. “I want this to be as soon as possible,” he added before journalists.
experts fear new infiltration
Nearly 400 rescuers are mobilized to try to save the ten minors trapped by 60 meters deep, half of which was flooded. The president had spoken, Saturday, a “decisive” day for rescue operations: “We will know if there is the possibility that divers can enter [in the mine] without risk”.
The divers could not however enter Saturday because the water level (34 meters of flooding) had dropped only 9.5 meters.
The divers “said that they did not know when” they could go down, said to the France-Presse agency (AFP) on the spot Alicia Huerta, sister-in-law of one of the ten minors underground.
Rescue use about twenty pumps. Experts, however, fear new infiltration from a neighboring mine.
Saturday evening, relatives participated in a mass near the improvised camp where they have gathered since Wednesday, away from the rescue area completed by the authorities.
recurring incidents
Unique producer of Mexican coal, the State of Coahuila is used to mining tragedies. In June 2021, seven workers died after underground collapse. On February 19, 2006, 65 minors died in the explosion of a pocket of gas underground in Pasta de Conchos, a mine controlled by the conglomerate Grupo México. Sixteen years later, 63 of the 65 bodies still lie at the bottom of the mine.
It has been sixteen years since families “require measures” against accidents “and their calls have not been heard,” deplored the company of Jesus, who affirms that the Jesuits accompany loved ones in their request for justice In front of international bodies.
In October 2010 in Chile, 33 workers had been able to get out of a copper mine, almost 700 meters deep, from the Atacama desert after 69 days underground and a landslide.