Several miners cited by Xinhua said many workers did not have cards, despite regulations requiring their use to enter underground farms.
The company that owns the Liushenyu mine, in the Chinese province of Shanxi (center), where a gas explosion caused 82 deaths on Friday, committed “serious infractions”, according to the official Chinese press.
The accident, on a farm located in Qinyuan district, also left two people missing, who have not yet been located.
The Xinhua news agency today highlighted several irregularities, including poor control of the actual number of workers underground, the existence of undeclared galleries, plans that did not correspond to the real situation of the mine and duplicate surveillance systems.
The head of Qinyuan district, Guo Xiaofang, said at a press conference that, after the accident, confusion at the site and the company’s lack of clarity regarding the number of workers meant that the first balance sheets were inaccurate.
The mine’s entrance panel indicated that, on that day, 124 people had gone down, but during the rescue operations it was found that the list of workers who had gone up to the surface did not correspond to the information provided by the company, which led to the discovery of a large number of people who had entered without a location card.
Several miners cited by Xinhua said many workers did not have cards, despite regulations requiring their use to enter underground farms.
One of them stated that, on his shift, almost no one had the device and that they were not required to use it.
During the rescue, the teams also discovered that the plans provided by the company did not correspond to reality and that there were hidden unmarked galleries.
According to the media outlet, the coal extracted from these areas, sometimes explored by subcontracted workers, was not accounted for in production or taxed.
An unnamed expert cited by the local press explained that “some mines, to escape supervision, create two sets of plans: one for inspections and another to guide actual production.”
The mine, privately managed and with an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons, had been classified this year as type B exploration, that is, with a “general” safety level, and was on a national list of mines with serious risks due to high levels of gas.
The agency added that in the past five years, Liushenyu had been sanctioned at least five times for security issues.
Those responsible for the company have already been placed “in the custody of the authorities”, an expression commonly used in China to refer to an arrest by security bodies, while a team from the State Council (Chinese Executive) investigates the causes of the accident and the responsibilities of the company and the supervisory bodies.
Coal mines, the material from which China generates around 60% of its electricity, continue to record a high rate of accidents, although in recent years the number of fatal accidents has decreased significantly.
The Chinese mining sector recorded more than three thousand deaths between 2018 and 2023, a number that represented a drop of 53.6% compared to the previous five-year period, according to official data.
