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Trapped for 30 hrs, special divers could be only hope for 2 Jharkhand miners
Basiya Manjhi and his assistant Manik Bauri were found missing when all of a sudden water flooded the SP seam of underground mine.
A team of professional divers from Odisha’s Cuttack was pressed in to rescue two miners trapped in a flooded underground coal mine for the last 30 hours in Jharkhand’s Mugma colliery area of Eastern Coalfield Limited (ECL) on Wednesday morning.
Mugma area general manager (GM) of ECL Sanctoria (Burdman district of West Bengal) Vibhash Chandra Singh told media persons that besides National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams from Ranchi and Asansol, a six-member squad of Odisha divers has been pressed in to rescue the two miners.
“We have also installed four pumps for pumping out water from the seam of underground coal mines so that trapped miners could be brought out as soon as possible,” he said.
Officials said pump operator Basiya Manjhi (56) and his assistant Manik Bauri (52) were found missing when all of a sudden water flooded the SP seam of underground mine at around 4am on Tuesday. Total four miners were engaged in dewatering MS seam of mines at that time.
On December 8, wee hours, the four miners were pumping out water from the seam when it got flooded. While two of them came out, Basiya Manjhi and Manik Bauri were still missing, said officials.
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Rescue teams from Mugma ( Dhanbad) and Sitarampur (West Bengal) were the first to be deployed for the search of the missing miners. When they failed, colliery management sought help from Professional Diving Services, Cuttack.
AD Mishra, director, Directorate General of Mines Safety (DGMS), the country’s mines monitoring body, also reached on the spot with his team. “Our first priority is to bring out missing miners from the underground mine. Thereafter a probe would be started,” he said.
Samir Tudu, one of the four miners, who came out safely, said all of a sudden a heavy storm with massive water flow flooded the spot where they were working. He along with Vikash Bhuian managed to come out of the mine in time.
