Search Stepped Up After Survivors Found in W. German Mine

Workers intensified the search Saturday for survivors of a powerful mine blast after rescuing six miners who survived 65 hours in an underground air pocket.

“It’s a miracle,” said Peter-Carl Ruehland, a spokesman for Preussen Elektra, the company that owns the coal mine.

The rescue of the six miners, given up for dead, came with the help of a media crew’s microphone, which was lowered 200 feet into the mine and picked up tapping sounds.

After the blast as 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, the bodies of 36 workers were recovered. On Thursday, a government official said there was no hope of finding survivors.

But at 2:10 a.m. Saturday, the six miners attracted the attention of a team searching for bodies by banging metal objects and shouting. The microphone was lowered into a shaft drilled for fresh air and one of the trapped miners was heard saying: “They have drilled a hole,” according to authorities.

Working their way toward the noises, rescuers first sighted a miner’s lamp at 4:20 a.m. The first of the six miners was hoisted to the surface an hour later . The last reached the top at 6 a.m., 65 hours and 30 minutes after the disaster.

Searchers, some with tears in their eyes, broke into applause as the exhausted but otherwise unhurt survivors--five Germans and a Turk between 21 and 37 years of age--reached the surface.

The Saturday morning discovery revitalized efforts to find the missing. But by Saturday evening, only another body--the 37th--had been recovered, leaving 14 miners still unaccounted for.

“It’s a faint hope, but a supervisor said there were tracks of two people who may also be in an area where they may have survived,” said Heinz Cramer, a board member of Preussen Elektra. “We’re stepping up the search.”

Authorities said the men were in a part of the mine that had not been demolished by the explosion, and that the poisonous fumes that caused so many fatalities did not penetrate their air pocket.

“Everybody was making their last wills and testaments,” survivor Thomas Gepperth, a mine supervisor who reportedly saved his fellow workers by leading them away from deadly gas, said. “I told them they didn’t have to.”

Cramer praised Gepperth’s actions. When the group felt the shock wave of the blast, Cramer said, they ran toward an exit. But Gepperth, 36, a veteran miner, realized they were running into high concentrations of deadly carbon monoxide when he saw another man staggering.

Gepperth turned the group in the other direction and instructed them to try to be calm to conserve oxygen, Cramer said.

Another survivor, also interviewed on state television but not identified, described hearing drilling on Friday, followed by silence.

“That was really agonizing, because nothing more was going on up there. “You start thinking, ‘Have they forgotten us or something? Maybe they’re figuring it’s not worth it,’ ” he said.

And survivor Egon Dehn, 36, told his brother-in-law the six never gave up hope of being rescued. He said they kept telling each other of the “Miracle of Lengede.”

In 1963, 11 miners were saved after two weeks trapped in a mine at Lengede in Lower Saxony.