One day after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged “more” efforts to evacuate workers, the Civil Protection service announced that it will inspect the sinkhole with a drone equipped with an underwater camera before rescuers enter.
“Today they will be working with an underwater drone that the Navy sent,” said the head of the agency, Laura Velázquez, during the conference by López Obrador, who supervised the rescue work on site on Sunday.
The official explained that the device has a high-resolution camera and light to record up to 250 meters deep, so that divers from the Ministry of Defense can identify possible obstacles “without putting at risk” the lives of rescuers.
The announcement of the camera caused a stir in the camp where the relatives of the miners are waiting in Agujita, a community in the state of Coahuila (north and border with the United States).
Some commented on the possibility that this inspection speeds up the entry of divers.
However, the dive through a well would not take place until the middle of this week, according to an Army diagram presented at the presidential conference.
According to those estimates, the safe water level to allow access is 1.5 meters. Currently the height is 19.4 meters.
At the same time, the government reported that work is continuing to extract water from the mine, which is between 30 and 40 meters deep, with motorized pumps.
“More than 300 liters per second are being removed (…), it is what is necessary according to the technicians and we are hurrying to remove the water so that the rescuers can enter,” said López Obrador.
-Savior Shelters-
The president assured that the personnel on the ground and the families maintain confidence that the miners are alive.
“Everyone has faith, no one is thinking about anything other than the rescue,” he said. “They explained to us that when working in these mines, the miners themselves make holes or shelters,” he added.
However, the anxiety is notorious among the relatives of the miners, who as the hours go by question the suitability of the rescue personnel and avoid talking to the journalists present at the scene.
Meanwhile, the security cordon around the mine was reinforced, AFP found.
The deposit is located about 1,130 km north of Mexico City, in the coal region of Coahuila, the main producer of this mineral in the country.
“It’s something very painful, we live it firsthand,” Rogelio Mireles, who retired from mining after the death of 65 workers in the Pasta de Cochos coal mine, told AFP on Monday in Sabinas, as a result of a gas explosion on February 19, 2006. Only two bodies were recovered.
Rogelio, 36, worked there but was not at the mine at the time of the blast. He now works in a local supermarket, but his case is exceptional. “There is no alternative, people need to work, there are not many sources of employment,” he says.
He says that the extraction through the so-called “pocitos” -artisanal holes through which the workers descend and extract the material, as in the case of Agujita- is much more dangerous than in the industrial mines.
Last Wednesday’s accident occurred when the crew ran into an adjoining area filled with water, which collapsed and flooded the mine, according to authorities. Five of the workers managed to escape, while the Prosecutor’s Office announced on Sunday the opening of an investigation.
Accidents in mines in Coahuila happen regularly. In June 2021, seven workers died after the collapse of another coal mine in Múzquiz.
