The explosion, which occurred Friday in a mine in Amasra, a coastal city on the Black Sea, at 6:15 p.m. local time (3:15 p.m. GMT), killed at least 25 people, 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.
“We are really facing a sad picture,” said Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, who went to the scene of the tragedy accompanied by his colleague from Energy.
Rescue teams were working on Friday evening to rescue dozens of workers trapped in galleries 300 and 350 meters below sea level.
They would be 49 still prisoners underground, according to Mr. Soylu who specified that 110 minors were there at the time of the explosion.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced he was canceling his schedule to travel to the crash site on Saturday.
“Our wish is that the loss of life is not higher and that our miners can be saved safe and sound,” he tweeted.
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.
“According to the first observations, it is a gas explosion,” said Turkish Energy Minister Fatih Donmez.
Afad, Turkey’s public disaster management body, initially announced on Twitter that a faulty transformer was the cause of the explosion, before retracting.
– Accident of 2014 –
“I don’t know what happened. There was a sudden pressure and I couldn’t see anything,” a miner who was able to get out of the tunnels by his own efforts told Anadolu Agency.
“Almost half of the workers have been evacuated. Most of them are fine, but there are also serious injuries,” Amasra mayor Recai Cakir told 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.
