Three feared dead in northeast India mine accident

Rescue operations still under way as nine others remain trapped in flooded Assam coal mine.

Three miners are feared dead inside a flooded coal mine in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, with rescue efforts ongoing to save nine others.

Rescue teams have spotted three bodies but have not been able to recover them yet, the local authorities in Assam’s hilly Dima Hasao district said in a statement on Tuesday. Twelve miners were trapped when water flooded the mine on Monday.

The Indian military said in a statement it has deployed divers, helicopters and engineers to help rescue the trapped men.

“The mine got flooded yesterday — the source was internal. They [the miners] probably hit some water channel and water came out and flooded it,” Mayank Kumar, district police chief in Dima Hasao, told the Reuters news agency.

Workers were “feared trapped 300 feet [91 metres] below the ground after water gushed in from a nearby unused mine”, Assam’s Mines Minister Kaushik Rai said.

“We are mobilising resources to rescue them,” he added.

Photographs shared by the army on social media showed rescue workers with ropes, cranes and other equipment standing at the edge of a large, vertical mine.

In India’s east and northeast, workers often extract coal in hazardous conditions in small “rat hole” mines in hilly areas. Following extraction, the coal is placed in boxes and hoisted to the surface with pulleys. Accidents in these illegal mining operations are frequent.

In one of the biggest disasters, in 2019, at least 15 miners were buried while working in an illegal mine in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya after it was flooded by water from a nearby river.