At least 25 workers were killed and 28 others injured in an explosion Friday at a coal mine in northwestern Turkey, while several dozen miners remained stranded some 300 meters below sea level.
The explosion, which took place in a mine in Amasra, a coastal town on the Black Sea, at 6:15 p.m. local time (5:15 p.m. Swiss time), left at least 25 dead and 28 injured, according to a new report communicated by the Turkish Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca on Twitter, which clarified that 11 people released from the mine were being treated in a hospital.
Rescue teams were working on Friday evening to save dozens of workers trapped in galleries 300 and 350 meters below sea level.
They would be 49 still prisoners underground, according to the Turkish Minister of the Interior Suleyman Soylu, who specified that 110 minors were there at the time of the explosion.
Accumulation of firedamp?
Rescue and medical teams, as well as family members of stranded miners, many of whom had tears in their eyes, were visible in the first images broadcast by Turkish media from the entrance to the mine.
The explosion is linked to an accumulation of firedamp, according to the Maden-Is union, quoted by the Turkish media. But the Turkish authorities believe that it is still early to determine the cause of the explosion.
Afad, Turkey’s public disaster management body, initially announced on Twitter that a faulty transformer was the cause of the explosion, before retracting.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dispatched his Ministers of Energy and Interior to the scene, according to the state agency Anadolu.
“Sudden Pressure”
“I don’t know what happened. There was a sudden pressure and I couldn’t see anything,” a miner told Anadolu who was able to come out of the galleries unscathed by his own efforts.
“Eighty-seven people were in the mine at the time of the explosion. Nearly half were able to be evacuated. Most of them are well, but there are also serious injuries,” said the mayor of Amasra, Recai Cakir, to the private Turkish channel NTV.
Accidents at work are frequent in Turkey, where the strong economic development of the past decade has often come at the expense of safety rules, particularly in construction and mining.
The country was brutally aware of this during an accident in Soma (west) in 2014: 301 miners were killed in a coal mine, after an explosion and a fire which had caused the collapse of a well.
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