RESCUE WORKERS were struggling last night to reach four miners trapped 90m (300ft) underground after water flooded a mine shaft at one of Wales’s last collieries.
The men have been buried in the Gleision mine, a small coal mine in the town of Cilybebyll near Swansea, since yesterday morning. Police received an emergency call from the mine area at 9.20am.
The men are believed to be trapped in a ventilation shaft.
Three of seven miners present during the accident escaped as the shaft they were in flooded. One is now at Morriston hospital. The emergency services have not been able to reach or communicate with the other four men.
Police confirmed the mine had flooded, not collapsed. “There is no blockage within the mine. There is water present in the mine,” a police official said.
“There is a dynamic search and rescue operation going on to rescue the four males still in the mine,” said Phil Davies, superintendent of South Wales police. “It is a difficult operation.”
By nightfall emergency services personnel were using four pumps to reduce the water levels underground, allowing emergency workers to venture down the shaft in search of the miners.
Disused workings at the mine may have become flooded, causing the miners’ shaft to become inundated when the wall between their shaft and the old shaft was breached.
Police did not reveal the names of the four miners, whose plight recalled the drama of the 33 Chilean copper miners trapped underground for more than two months last year.
Coal Direct, the privately held owner of Gleision, was not available for comment. The company’s registered address is a suburban home in Port Talbot.
The health and safety executive and police will carry out an investigation of the Gleision colliery accident, Mr Davies said.
The once-booming coal industry of south Wales – along with collieries in the midlands and the northeast – has largely shut down since the 1990s. Mine depletion, high operating costs, labour disputes, and the globalisation of coal supply chains led the United Kingdom’s power companies to source much of their coal abroad.
London-listed UK Coal is the last large domestic producer, but small-scale coal mining persists in places like Cilybebyll.
In 2010 the local authorities approved the extension of the Gleision colliery. The mine has been opened and shut repeatedly over the past decades, according to residents of the town.
“We’re just hoping they’re safe and that it’s just a matter of time to get them out,” said Marcia Spooner, a councillor at Cilybebyll. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)