Ruda Slaska, Poland – Combustible gases forced rescuers to suspend their search Wednesday for 15 coal miners missing more than a half-mile underground, and the Polish president said conditions were worsening for any workers still alive after a deadly subterranean explosion.
Anxious family members prayed at the shrine of St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners, at the Halemba mine in southern Poland, where a methane explosion Tuesday killed eight and left the others missing.
“The situation is getting worse down there, and there are no rescue teams there. We cannot exclude that there is still a fire burning at the site, and that increases the danger of another explosion,” President Lech Kaczynski said after surveying the site in Ruda Slaska. “Although one can never lose hope and has to fight to the very end, the situation is very bad.”
Some 300 yards of rubble remained between the miners and the point reached by rescuers. Locator beacons carried by the miners had stopped emitting signals. Overnight attempts to reach them were halted after high concentrations of gas raised fears of a second blast.
“Any spark could cause another explosion and more victims,” rescue worker Boguslaw Ozog said. “Until this situation allows us to work there safely, we are not going to force anyone down there like kamikazes.”
Teams have recovered six bodies from the scene of the blast, said Zbigniew Madej, spokesman for the mine operator. Another two bodies were found but remained underground.
Andrzej Pytlik, 30, whose brother-in-law was one of the miners involved, said that as a miner himself, he had given up hope. “I work in the mines, and I know that hope is scant because that’s the truth,” he said.
After meeting with family members, Kaczynski pledged a full investigation. He canceled planned trips to Georgia and Romania this week.
“I should be here … even though these were very important visits,” he said.
Labor Minister Anna Kalata promised swift financial assistance for the families.
The miners, between 21 and 59 years old, were trying to retrieve valuable equipment that was abandoned months ago in a section of the Halemba mine that was closed because of dangerously high gas concentrations.
Labor unions complain that a lack of investment and massive layoffs in recent years have resulted in falling safety standards at the nation’s mines.
The nearly 50-year-old Ha lem ba mine, located in the heart of the Silesia industrial region, is one of the oldest in Poland and has a record of serious accidents. In 1990, 19 miners were killed and 20 injured in a gas explosion at the mine. In 1991, five miners were killed in a cave-in.
Poland’s worst mining accidents were in 1974 and 1979, when explosions killed 34 miners each at the Czechowice-Dzi edzice in Silesia and the Dymitrow mine in Bytom.
