Miscellaneous

Citation

(2007), "Miscellaneous", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2007.07316aac.006

Miscellaneous

29 August 2005 Xingning, China

Chinese rescuers today gave up the search for 120 miners trapped for weeks in a flooded coal pit, putting the official death toll from the accident at 123, Xinhua news agency said. Only three bodies had been recovered since the Daxing colliery in Xingning, southern Guangdong province, flooded on 7 August, Xinhua said. Earlier on Friday (26 August), rescuers had to suspend the search when a section of the Daxing mine collapsed. “Experts attributed the mine cave-in chiefly to the long time it had been filled with water, adding that it may endanger the safety of rescuers,” Xinhua said. At the time of the accident, the mine was operating without a licence and in violation of local government orders to shut down for inspections. State media previously said that investigators were looking into whether any government officials held stakes in the Daxing mine, a practice that is illegal but not uncommon in China.

31 August 2005. China is suspending production at 7,000 coal mines – nearly one-third of the nationwide total – in a safety crackdown on the accident-plagued industry, a government newspaper reported today. The mines, most of them small and poorly equipped, will be required to improve safety measures and will not be allowed to reopen if they fail to meet national standards, the China Daily said. The announcement came two days after 123 miners missing in a flooded coal mine in southern China were declared dead in a highly publicised disaster. Eleven mine officials blamed for the accident have been detained and two local mayors dismissed. So far, 1,324 mines have closed, and the rest must suspend production by the end of the year, the China Daily said. It said China’s energy supplies should not be affected, because the mines account for only a small fraction of coal output. China has about 24,000 coal mines, according to the government. Fires, floods and other accidents killed more than 5,000 Chinese coal miners last year. Many of the accidents are blamed on lack of fire-control and ventilation equipment or failure to enforce safety rules. Despite repeated official promises to tighten enforcement, the death toll in coal mine accidents rose 33 percent in the first half of this year to 2,672, according to the government.

5 September 2005 Cable Car Crash, Soelden, Tyrol, Austria

Nine people were killed when a helicopter dropped a concrete block on a ski-lift, plunging a cable car filled with tourists down a mountainside in the western Austrian state of Tyrol, police said today. Austrian radio reported that the victims were mainly young ski tourists travelling to the glacier ski area above the popular Alpine resort of Soelden. A helicopter carrying material to a mountain-top construction site shed its load over the ski-lift, knocking one car off its wires and causing others to swing violently and throw out their passengers, police said. Television pictures showed bodies lying on the rock beneath the glacier. Over 100 other passengers had to be rescued from stranded cable cars. A spokeswoman for the Austrian Red Cross said up to ten more people had been seriously injured in the incident. Austrian press agency APA reported that the helicopter was flying the piece of concrete, weighing around 750 kilograms, around 300 metres above the ski-lift cables, when the block fell.