In the isolated northeastern region of India, coal mining accidents are not unusual.
Two days into the search for nine men who were trapped below, the body of a miner was found Wednesday in a remote part of the northeastern Indian state of Assam, from a flooded coal mine.
Officials and a state minister say miners struck a water source Monday morning, causing the 300-foot (91.44-meter) deep mine, which has several underground tunnels, to overflow.
Expert divers entered the mine again early on Wednesday and were managed to extract a body, despite the level of the floods hindering rescue efforts on Tuesday, Assam state chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on X.
The mine is unlawful, according to officials.
After the body was discovered, one of the divers told a local news channel, “We didn’t see the body, it was completely dark inside, we felt a body using our hands, and that’s how we were able to rescue them”.
To aid with the rescue attempts in the steep Dima Hasao area of Assam, the Army has sent engineers, drivers, and helicopters.
According to H P S Kandhari, a commandant in the National Disaster Relief Foce, the federal organization in charge of such operations, “it is difficult to say how long the operation will take, because we have been told there are rat holes in the mine”, he told news agency Ali.
Once common in the northeastern states of India, rat hole mines derive their name from the fact that their tunnels are only large enough for workers to pass through. Due to the significant number of deaths and environmental harm, they were outlawed in 2014.
When water from a nearby river inundated an illegal rat-hole mine in the neighboring state of Meghalaya in 2019, at least 15 miners were buried while working there.
