With more caution than enthusiasm, relatives of the ten miners who have been trapped for a week by the flooding in a mine in northern Mexico await this Wednesday the imminent entry of rescuers who will try to return them to the surface.
“All the rescuers are with the team to be able to enter at any time today,” said the national coordinator of Civil Protection, Laura Velázquez, during the usual press conference of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Around the El Pinabete mine, in the municipality of Agujita (Coahuila state), relatives of the miners listened on their phones to the meeting that government representatives held with other relatives who are within the rescue zone.
From a cell phone, a woman’s voice explains that the water in the wells has reached an “optimal” level for the military divers to start exploring and enter.
“Let’s hope that now it is true. Every day they say the same thing,” expresses skeptical Juan Orlando Mireles, who along with two brothers awaits the return alive of José Luis, his father.
For five days, the Mexican military has erected a perimeter fence that keeps journalists, but also many relatives, away from the rescue area. Phones are how “outsiders” can follow these reports that happen a couple of times a day.
From that point there is not much activity. Only workers and soldiers move around the many pipes that extract jets of water from the wells where the miners were trapped, whose exact location is unknown.
“To speed up the water extraction process, a strategy was developed that allows increasing the outflow through the drilling of ten” holes, Velázquez explained during the presidential conference.
The mine where the incident occurred is about 60 meters deep and is partially filled with cloudy water and solid elements that have so far prevented rescuers from entering, according to images recorded with an aquatic drone and released by Civil Protection.
– A lot of accumulated water –
According to the government, the miners trapped last Wednesday opened a hole in an adjoining mine that was flooded, causing the water to overflow into the shaft where they were maneuvering.
Since then, the authorities have been focused on lowering the water level to 1.5 meters to make access viable.
In a region of Mexico hit by a severe drought, the amount of liquid that has been extracted for seven days is surprising.
Mireles, a miner like his father, explains that this may have to do with the proximity of the Sabinas River and the existence of the old Las Conchas mine, abandoned more than 30 years ago, and where the enormous amount of water that filled these precarious coal pits.
Unlike the “pocitos,” an artisanal method that opens a hole from the surface to the coal mantle, industrial mines like Las Conchas have long underground tunnels where water would have accumulated, explains Mireles.
Workers usually go down these cavities that lack reinforcements on their walls, unlike industrial operations.
According to the governor of Coahuila, Miguel Riquelme, the deposit operated by a private company did not have updated plans.
The prosecutor’s office announced that it has opened an investigation into this mining accident, frequent in this state.
In June 2021, seven workers died after the collapse of another coal mine in the municipality of Múzquiz.
The most serious mining incident in this region occurred on February 19, 2006, when a gas explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine, controlled by the Grupo México conglomerate, caused the death of 65 workers. Only two bodies were recovered.
YS
