ROSTOV-ON-DON, Oct 27: Rescuers desperately worked against the clock on Monday in their search for 13 miners who have been trapped by icy water in a coal mine in southern Russia for more than four days.
Crews were hewing their way through a coal seam to the place in the Zapadnaya mine where the men were thought to have taken refuge after icy water flooded the shafts where they were working on Thursday, a regional official said.
As they cut though the seam, rescuers also fought to stem the inflow of water, which continued to fill Zapadnya’s tunnels hundreds of metres below the surface at a rate of more than half a metre an hour.—AFP
