Guwahati, India: Rescuers recovered the body of a miner from a flooded coal mine in Assam’s remote Dima Hasao district on Wednesday, two days after nine workers became trapped underground.
The 300-foot-deep coal mine, with multiple underground tunnels, is believed to have flooded on Monday morning after miners struck a water source, according to officials and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.
The severe flooding hindered rescue efforts on Tuesday, but expert divers re-entered the mine early Wednesday and managed to recover a body, Sarma confirmed on X (formerly Twitter).
Authorities have declared the mine illegal.
“We couldn’t see the body; it was completely dark inside. We located it by touch and managed to recover it that way,” one of the divers told a local news channel after the operation.
The Army has mobilized divers, helicopters, and engineers to assist with rescue operations in Assam’s hilly Dima Hasao district.
“The duration of the operation is hard to predict, as we’ve been informed there are rat-hole tunnels in the mine,” said H.P.S. Kandhari, a commandant with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the federal agency overseeing the efforts, in a statement to news agency ANI.
Rat-hole mines, named for their narrow tunnels barely large enough for workers to crawl through, were widely used in India’s northeastern states. However, they were banned in 2014 due to their high fatality rates and severe environmental impact.
In 2019, at least 15 miners lost their lives while working in an illegal rat-hole mine in neighboring Meghalaya. The mine flooded after water from a nearby river surged into its tunnels, trapping the workers underground.
Coal mining disasters are frequent occurrences in India’s remote northeastern region.
