The Luotuoshan coal mine flood was an incident that began on Monday, March 1, 2010, when a large amount of water

flooded A flood is an overflow of water ( or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of "flowing water", the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are of significant concern in agriculture, civ ...

the Luotuoshan coal mine near the city of

Wuhai Wuhai (; ''Üqai qota'', Mongolian Cyrillic: Үхай хот) is a prefecture-level city and regional center in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, and is by area the smallest prefecture-level division of the region. It is located on ...

in the

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Inner Mongolia, officially the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region of China. Its border includes two-thirds of the length of China's border with the country of Mongolia. Inner Mongolia also accounts for a small section of C ...

of the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. A total of 77 workers were underground when they broke into a large pool of

Ordovician The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era, and the second of twelve periods of the Phanerozoic Eon (geology), Eon. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years f ...

limestone water early in the morning. By Monday evening, 45 were rescued and one was confirmed dead. All rescue operations were stopped after 14 days, when medical teams believed that the 31 trapped coal miners had no chance of survival. The rescue work was the largest coal mine mobilization in China's history with 40 professional rescue teams involved, comprising 20,384 people. Infrared surveillance cameras and echo megaphones were used to try to detect life underground, but were unsuccessful. Workers continued pumping water out of the mine and attempting to stop the flooding after the rescue efforts were called off. 3,850 cubic meters of water were being pumped out every hour since the rescue efforts began, with around 100,000 cubic meters of water remaining in the mine on March 24. Yi Lan, a spokesperson for the rescue headquarters, said that workers were hoping to seal the mine pit with 50 million cubic meters of cement, rubble and

water glass Sodium silicate is a generic name for chemical compounds with the formula or ·, such as sodium metasilicate (), sodium orthosilicate (), and sodium pyrosilicate (). The anions are often polymeric. These compounds are generally colorless transp ...

by April 4. The construction of the mine, which was still underway at the time of the incident, began in 2006 with the goal of producing 1.5 million tons of coal per year. The mine is owned by Wuhai Energy Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of China's largest coal producer Shenhua Group Corp. Ltd.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Luotuoshan coal mine flood, 2010 Coal mining disasters in China 2010 mining disasters 2010 disasters in China 2010 floods in Asia March 2010 in China

See also

References