Russia: Russian rescuers battled yesterday to reach 46 miners trapped almost a kilometre underground, as freezing water poured into their coal shaft from a subterranean lake, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
The lake burst its banks on Thursday night, and 25 miners managed to escape the southern Russian mine before the current grew too strong to fight.
But their colleagues had no chance to flee to the surface, 800 metres above, after the deluge knocked out power supplies and paralysed an emergency lift.
"There are hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of water in there already," said Mr Alexander Subbotin, a Russian safety regulator. "We can only hope that they found safer spots in the upper areas."
Relatives who gathered in the sleet outside the Zapadnaya mine, close to Russia's border with Ukraine, shared his hope that the miners had managed to scramble up to air pockets where mine officials said they could survive for days. The shaft was warm and the men should have some food with them, they said.
The assembled relatives, some in tears, groaned when Mr Vladimir Chub, governor of the coal-rich Rostov region, said rescuers would need two days to drill through from nearby tunnels to the shaft where the miners were thought to be trapped. A special rescue team arrived from Moscow to aid the effort.
"The work is going on round the clock, and everything necessary is in place; whatever they didn't have has already been sent," said Mr Sergei Shoigu, Russia's Emergencies Minister, after a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Putin - criticised in the past for responding slowly to crises - told Mr Shoigu and Energy Minister Mr Igor Yusufov to do everything possible to save the miners.
"We really hope that we'll be able to make it the 60 metres from the . . . neighbouring shaft to reach the 46 people and get them to the surface," Mr Yusufov said.
Mr Sergei Nazarov, Mr Chub's deputy, said the operation was complicated by the fact that rescuers had been unable to make any contact with the trapped miners.
"We have established approximately where the people are," Mr Nazarov told NTV television. "But I emphasise that it is only approximate." Some of the miners who escaped the torrent of water said they were stunned at how fast it flooded the mine, one of many in the Rostov region and neighbouring Ukraine built during Josef Stalin's drive to industrialise the Soviet Union.
"We barely got out of there," miner Mr Igor Kulikov told NTV. "The people who were in the lower levels got trapped." Mr Konstantin Doroshenko, also safe above ground, agreed.
"All of a sudden, we were up to our necks in water," he said. Russian media said water burst into the same mine in February, when no one was underground. Dozens of miners die in accidents in Russia annually, and more than 200 have died in Ukraine's often decrepit mines in each of the last two years.