China mine safety slammed as hopes fade for 181

BEIJING, Aug 22 (Reuters) Desperate efforts to save 181 Chinese coal miners from two shafts flooded with water and mud faced near impossible odds today, as a safety official said mine owners had failed to anticipate the threat of disaster.

The 181 miners have been trapped in the eastern province of Shandong since Friday, when a river dyke burst in torrential rain sending water surging into the shafts -- a main one where 172 miners were missing and another nearby where there were nine.

Officials vowed to press ahead with attempts to pump the shafts dry, but even the official Xinhua news agency has said there was little hope of the men emerging alive.

Rescuers face more than 12 million cubic metres of water mixed with 300,000 cubic metres of mud and coal in the main shaft, the State Administration of Work Safety estimated on its Web site (www.chinasafety.gov.cn).

A drill operator said his machinery was struggling to break through so more pumps could get to work.

''The ground surface is too hard and the drill can't dig in and kicks back,'' he told China Radio International.

Relatives of the missing have protested that the Huayuan Mining Co, which runs the bigger shaft, did not act to protect the men from swollen waters and has failed to keep them informed.

Their accusations have been backed by the State Administration of Work Safety, which told the China Youth Daily that managers and officials did not heed signs of potential calamity.

Since July, there had been 15 cases of heavy rain causing mine floods, the agency spokesman, Huang Yi, was quoted as saying.

''This shows that responses to accidents sparked by natural disasters have been inadequate, some employers have been lackadaisical and the preparation plans of the concerned parties been inadequate,'' he told the paper.

Huang said the Huayuan company failed to anticipate the breach of the nearby river and did not have adequate emergency plans. But the government had yet to launch an investigation that would look at who was to blame, he added.

One man said he saw mine managers on Friday trying to close the breach in the river rather than warning those underground, the China Daily reported yesterday.

Only a day before the disaster, safety officials gathered in Xintai discussed the threat of floods in coal mines, showing that officials knew of seasonal risks from flooding.

The national safety authority described how the torrent from the broken dyke flooded land near the mines, punching through sandy soil and landfill to bore into the earth and surge through into nearby shafts.

More than 2,000 people have been killed in China's coal mines in the first seven months of this year alone, despite repeated government campaigns to clean up the industry that has long been the world's deadliest.

REUTERS RKM RAI0939