The workers stuck in the coal mine at the beginning of August have not been contacted for weeks. The rescue efforts and the working conditions in the Coahuila mines have attracted a lot of criticism.
of Mexico the management has started to talk about the rescue operation of the miners in Coahuila as a search for bodies, reported the Spanish newspaper El País. In early August, ten miners were trapped in a flooded coal mine in Sabinas, Coahuila state, northern Mexico.
The situation at the Coahuila mine already seemed desperate last week thursday, when the authorities presented the miners’ families with a rescue plan. Although the plan included three different options for progress, none of them raised much hope of finding the workers alive – the authorities estimated that the rescue work would take between 6 and 11 months.
Only on Sunday, the president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador talked about the miners openly as a body for the first time.
“We consulted German and American experts. They suggested rescue work by making open pits. This is how we can save the bodies of the miners,” he said at a press conference in the state of Nuevo León on Sunday.
The miners hundreds of Mexican army soldiers and military divers have participated in the search in recent weeks. However, after the first two weeks, the rescue work resumed to the starting screenwhen another collapse in a nearby abandoned mine caused water levels to rise in mine shafts that rescue workers had been trying to empty.
On August 3, one of the mine walls broke during the excavation work, causing three mine shafts to fill with water. Five employees managed to escape, but the ten trapped employees have not been contacted since the accident.
of El Milenio newspaper according to one survivor, before the accident, he heard a strong gust of wind and then saw his co-worker covered in water.
Officials and the owner of the collapsed mine has been heavily criticized for the corruption associated with Mexican mining, the poor occupational safety in the mining industry, the enabling of the accident and the slow rescue efforts.
At first, the miners’ family members rejected the authorities’ proposal for months-long rescue operations. At the weekend, however, they agreed to the current plan for saving the bodies and are now waiting for the promised monetary compensation.
Family members of miners trapped in the mine wait outside the mine for information about their loved ones in Sabinas, Coahuila on August 14.
Soldiers and engineers involved in the rescue of miners inspect one of the Sabinas mines in Coahuila on August 17, 2022.
In addition, the enraged family members have already called for the coordinator of Mexico’s national rescue service on two occasions by Laura Velázquez dismissal.
“He’s a liar, he’d quit already, hang up his gloves and go home,” the sister of one of the miners said, according to Aristegui Noticias online media, after authorities unveiled their months-long rescue plan last week.
President Amlo has dismissed the family members’ demands as “politicization”, news reports, among other things El Universal newspaper. Coal mining is a politically sensitive topic in Mexico.
With his energy policy, the current president has wanted to strengthen national electricity production and the position of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). According to El País, up to 99 percent of CFE’s coal is mined in the state of Coahuila, where the current accident also occurred.
Financial magazine El Financieron according to CFE, the company that owned the flooded mine had been inspected and found safe. However, experts have pointed out that the mine in question should have been known to be dangerous from the beginning.
Right next to it was a collapsed mine, where huge amounts of water had accumulated after it was abandoned in 1996. In August, the abandoned mine’s water reservoir allowed water to also flood into adjacent mine shafts in use and made rescue operations difficult.
In total More than 3,100 fatal mining accidents have been registered in the state of Coahuila since the state began mining coal in the 1800s. Several organizations blame mine owners for the fact that working conditions have not improved even in recent years.
“Get to know the coal region of Coahuila, where we say that red coal is mined when safety regulations are not followed and the mine is stained with the miners’ blood,” wrote the Pasta de Conchos organization, which promotes the rights of coal miners on Twitter a good week after the accident in Sabinas.
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