A victim of a fuel plant crisis in India has shared a terrible accounts of the moments after the tunnel was immediately engulfed by water.
Ravi Rai was working in the plant in the north-eastern condition of Assam on Monday night when water entered the trap.
” We were holding on to a rope in 50-60ft ( 15-18m ) deep water for at least 50 minutes before being pulled out”, he said.
Rescuers are racing to save the miners trapped in the flooded mine in a remote area in Assam. Officials say one body has been recovered and according to reports, two more are feared dead. Six others are believed to still be trapped in the mine.
Mr Rai, who is from Nepal, says he was working inside a so-called “rat-hole” mine- a small hole dug personally to collect coal- when water immediately started flooding in.
Like pits are small, generally dug only wide enough for one person to remove coal. Miners climb over small shafts, sometimes using cords or ladders, leading to parallel tunnels where fuel is extracted.
” We were working inside the plant and waters entered immediately. We don’t hear from where]the liquid came]… We ran to save our lives. We were therefore hanging by a cord in some 50-60 feet deep waters”, he said.
For almost an afternoon, he and some others were hanging by a rope attached to a crane, and Mr Rai says there were moments when he feared they wouldn’t live.
” We]slipped ] back into the water again, but we managed to escape”, he says.
Local media reports say more than a few workers managed to escape from the pipe but no official number has been given however.
Despite his injuries, Mr Rai is relieved to be safe. However, his partner, even from Nepal, remains among the trapped.
” My community has still not come]to the site ]- I don’t think they’ve been informed however”, he said.
The incident occurred on Monday, when nine men were trapped inside the plant in the plains Dima Hasao city after water from a local unused me immediately gushed in, according to reports.
The military has deployed deep-sea divers and teams to rescue the buried miners and pumps out liquid from the plant, while the military has sent helicopters, engineers and divers to aid in the rescue, ANI news agency reported.
Officials say high water levels in the mine have posed significant challenges to the rescue and recovery operation.
HPS Kandhari, a senior official in the National Disaster Relief Force ( NDRF), said it was difficult to estimate the duration of the operation.
” It is very difficult to get inside the water, there’s hardly anything visible and we don’t know what is inside”, he said.
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that the flooded mine appears to be illegal.
The police is investigating the case and a person has been arrested, he said.
India banned so-called rat-hole mining in 2014, but despite this, small illegal mines continue to operate in Assam and other northern and north-eastern states. Accidents are not uncommon here.
Six workers were killed in January 2024 after a fire broke out in a rat-hole coal mine in Nagaland state.
In 2018, at least 15 men were trapped in an illegal mine in Meghalaya after water from a nearby river flooded it.
Five miners managed to escape, but rescue efforts for the others continued until March of the following year. Only two bodies were recovered.
Additional reporting by Dilip Kumar Sharma in Guwahati
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