Rescue workers are set to resume their efforts early Thursday to reach 15 miners trapped underground in a Polish coal mine, though local media reports suggest it may be too late to save them. The rescue operation had been suspended on Wednesday due to dangerous conditions. The miners have been trapped since Tuesday following a methane explosionthat killed at least eight miners. The incident occurred in a shaft over 1 km underground in the Halemba mine, located in the town of Ruda Slaska, 300 km southwest of Warsaw.
“The level of the gas has fallen low enough to allow us to renew the rescue effort,” stated Zbigniew Madej, spokesman for the state-owned company Polish Coal Co, to the IAR news agency. Initial indications suggest it may take as little as two to three hours to reach the remaining miners.
Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski expressed his concerns for the trapped men during a news conference on Wednesday after visiting the site. “Even though we should never lose hope, I will not hide the fact that the situation is very, very grim,” he said. Officials noted that the blast seemed to have damaged an underground water pump, leading to flooding and leaving little hope of finding anyone alive.
Family members are waiting patiently at the site for news of their loved ones and are being offered counseling by local doctors. “I was once a miner myself. When I heard the news, my first thought was that my son is dead,” said Michal Wasowski, 55, whose son is among the missing. “A methane explosion is one of the most horrible things that can happen underground and this time it happened to my son.”
The Halemba mine, one of the oldest in Poland, has been operational since 1957. Situated in the heart of the Silesia region’s industrial belt, it has witnessed several disasters, including a gas explosion in 1990 that killed 19 miners. Poland’s state-run mining industry, established before the fall of communism in 1989 and lacking investment for years, has seen hundreds of deaths over the decades. The president announced there would be a public inquiry into the cause of the disaster, noting indications that some of the miners were inexperienced and not sufficiently qualified.
