Death Toll Now 30 in Mexico Mine Blast

The official death count rose to 30 Tuesday in an explosion and fire in a coal mine in northern Mexico. Nine other miners are feared dead, trapped near the bottom in the worst mining disaster in Mexico in 19 years.

Rescue teams of miners and technicians from the Red Cross and local fire departments worked through the day Tuesday in an effort to rescue the last miners believed to have been trapped by the explosion Monday. Rescue operations were delayed by the need to pump out water poured in to extinguish the blaze.

“The nine are cut off in the next to the last cave of the mine,” said Martin Flores Cura, a member of the fire department in Monclova, the largest nearby city. “It has been a long time and there is probably very little oxygen where they are.”

The blast occurred at the “Four and a Half” mine in Las Esperanzas about 80 miles southwest of Piedras Negras on the Texas border. The mining area is in Coahuila, a major coal-producing state.

Coking Coal Produced

The mine, which extends for more than a mile underground, produces coking coal, which is used in the making of steel.

Ninety-nine miners, most of them burned or bruised, escaped in the first moments after the explosion or were pulled out afterward. There were 138 miners working the morning shift when the explosion occurred, company officials said.

The explosion was set off when a short circuit in an electrical transformer ignited methane gas that had built up in the mine, according to officials of Sidermex, the government steel company that owns the mine.

Sidermex officials had no explanation for the buildup of the volatile gas.

“No one really knows what happened,” said Isidro Mendicute, a company spokesman. “In all such mines there are those sorts of gases.”

A surviving miner, Rogelio Gonzalez, told a reporter by telephone that his protective helmet was blown off by the blast in the mine.

“My only thought was to escape,” he said. “Even though I carried my lantern, I could see almost nothing, because of the dust. I grabbed the rail and looked for an exit. It took me, I think, 45 minutes to get out.”

Charred and disfigured bodies were taken to a funeral home in Muzquiz.

Badly Burned

“They were badly burned, with a lot of broken bones,” said Rogelio Chavarria, director of a mortuary there.

Injured miners were sent to hospitals in Monclova and Monterrey, capital of the adjoining state of Nuevo Leon. The first two victims were taken out Monday afternoon, but it was not until after nightfall that rescuers began to find the majority of the dead deep within the mine.

In 1969, an explosion and fire killed 155 miners at coal works in Barroteran, six miles south of Las Esperanzas.