Sixty miners were killed in an explosion on 19 March at the Xishui Colliery in Shouzhou City, a major coalmining area in Shanxi Province, and another ten miners are currently still missing. Four of the mine’s owners have been detained by the police, state media reported.

Forty-one bodies of miners trapped in the blast have been retrieved from the colliery's Xishui Coalmine, while 19 other bodies were found in the adjacent Kangjiayao Coalmine. Eight rescue teams are still searching for another ten missing miners, according to reports. Most of those working underground at the two coalmines at the time of the blast were migrant workers from the provinces of Shanxi, Sichuan, Hubei, Zhejiang and Anhui.

The gas explosion tore through the Xishui mine around noon on 19 March and the explosion then caused a wall to collapse in the neighboring Kangjiayao mine.

Xishui Coalmine, which was built in 1993 and has an annual output of 150,000 tons of coal, had been ordered to suspend production after safety problems were uncovered in November 2004, but work there had resumed "in defiance of the order," according to Xinhua, quoting an unidentified official at the provincial coal-mining supervision office. The Kangjiayao Coalmine was reportedly operating lawfully and with government approval.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao told safety officials and rescue teams to do their best to save the trapped miners. Li Yizhong, director of the General Administration of Work Safety (GAWS), and Zhou Tiechui, director of GAWS' State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, both arrived in Shouzhou on 20 March to direct the rescue operation, Xinhua said.

A compensation plan has reportedly been drawn up under which the families of each dead miner will receive 200,000 Yuan – an unusually high figure for cases of this kind in China. The new compensation standard, henceforth to be applied throughout Shanxi Province, was first introduced following a gas explosion accident at the Daxian Sankeng Colliery in Yangquan City, Shanxi, on 9 December 2004 that killed 33 miners. According to Xinhua, the owners of the Daxian Sankeng Colliery have now paid out 6.6 million Yuan to the families of the dead.

The news agency also reported on 20 December that the new rule was meant to "sound an alarm" among mine owners and "discourage them from reaping undeserved profits at the cost of the miners' personal safety."

The Xishui coalmine explosion happened just one month after China’s deadliest mining accident since 1949 – the disaster at the Sujiawan Coalmine in Liaoning Province that killed 214 miners. Other major mining disasters in China that together have claimed hundreds of miners’ lives in the last few months include the Daping Coalmine explosion in Xinmi City, Henan Province, on 20 October 2004 in which 148 miners were killed, and the Chenjiashan Coalmine explosion in Shaanxi Province on 28 November 2004 in which 166 miners lost their lives.

Meanwhile, on 17 March, yet another 19 coalminers lost their lives in an explosion at the Sulongsi Coalmine in Fengjie county, Chongqing municipality.

Sources: Xinhua News Agency, Associated Press.

21 March 2005