“Our wish is that the loss of human life is not higher and that our miners can be saved”, wished Mr. Erdogan in a tweet published Friday evening.
The explosion occurred Friday at 6:15 p.m. local time (3:15 p.m. GMT) in a mine in the city of Amasra located on the shores of the Black Sea, and claimed the lives of 25 people, according to a new report communicated by the Turkish Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca on Twitter, who said 11 people who had come out of the mine were being treated in a hospital.
Rescue teams were hard at work trying to save dozens of workers stranded in galleries located 300 and 350 meters below sea level.
According to Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, 49 of the 110 minors who were there at the time of the explosion were trapped underground.
“We are really in front of a sad picture”, described Mr. Soylu who went urgently to the scene of the tragedy in the company of the Turkish Minister of Energy, Fatih Donmez.
“According to the first observations, it is a gas explosion,” explained Mr. Donmez.
Afad, Turkey’s state-run disaster management body, initially tweeted that a faulty transformer was the cause of the blast, before recanting and explaining that methane had ignited for “unknown reasons”.
– “Sudden pressure” –
Images broadcast by Turkish media from the entrance to the mine showed family members of stranded miners, many in tears, as rescuers provided oxygen to workers released from the mine and transported them to the nearest hospitals.
“I don’t know what happened,” a miner told the Anadolu news agency who was able to get out of the tunnels unscathed by his own means. “There was a sudden pressure and I couldn’t see anything”
As the explosion occurred shortly before sunset, rescue operations were slowed by the darkness.
“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.
According to the local governor, a team of more than 70 people managed to reach a point in the well located some 250 meters deep.
It was not yet clear that rescuers could get any closer to trapped workers.
An accident investigation has been opened by the local prosecutor’s office.
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 2014 in Soma, in the west of the country, when 301 miners were killed in a coal mine, after an explosion and a fire which had caused the collapse of a well.
Sentences of up to 22 years’ imprisonment and six months had been pronounced by the Turkish courts against five mine officials, found guilty of negligence.
