Desperate rescue bid launched for trapped miners in Indonesia
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Singapore/Jakarta: Search and rescue crews were on Thursday desperately attempting to save eight miners trapped as far as 60 metres underground in Indonesia after their illegal gold mine was flooded.
The miners were working in one of dozens of pits at the facility in the district of Banyumas in Central Java province on Tuesday night, when it suddenly began to fill with water suspected to be from a nearby river.
Search and rescue personnel peer into a mine shaft in Indonesia’s Central Java province where eight workers have been trapped.
An urgent effort has been launched to find any survivors, with police and the military joining a rescue team of more than 100 at the site on Thursday.
The incident was only reported to police by the mine’s management on Wednesday morning.
The site is an unauthorised gold mine, which are widespread in Indonesia, and often sorely lack safety standards.
Adah Sudarsa, the head of search and rescue for Cilacap regency in Central Java, said they were pumping water out of the wells at the mine around the clock and divers could also be dispatched.
Rescuers have been pumping water out of the pit in which the miners were digging.
The miners were thought to be between 30 and 60 metres below the surface but because of the layout of the mine it was not known whether they could still breathe or had been submerged, he said.
“We don’t know yet but we see that the pits are full of water,” he said in an interview. “And the pits are zigzag and narrow it is difficult for divers to manoeuvre. This is our problem because we have to consider their safety too. The deeper you go, the narrower it becomes. I think [the operation] has a high level of difficulty.
“The water flow is quite strong because it has only receded by around two meters since last night. We are monitoring if the water will rise again. We keep pumping to dry out the excavation holes.”
A miner was able to escape from an adjacent pit, near the village of Pancurendang, when the water burst in.
But local workers reported the missing eight had been digging further down, Sudarsa said.
“Near here there is a river, and the entrenchments are quite deep, around 60 metres, and near these excavations there is river flow,” he said. “Our concern is that there are some leaks from the river that go into [the entrenchments]. We also got information from the local people’s experiences that when it rains, there will be leaks and they usually pump out the water [from the mine shafts].
“We see that the water [in the river] is only ankle deep. Perhaps because it’s not been raining for days. However, the water keeps coming down from the mountain. So the water flow is quite strong.”
He said workers may have been scared to report the accident at first.
“They attempted to rescue their friends but they then realised they could not do it. So they panicked and they informed the police.”
There have been at least 72 people killed in accidents at illegal gold mines in Indonesia since 2015, the most deadly of which was a collapse of a mine in North Sulawesi in 2019 in which 28 were buried.
Sudarsa said the rescue operation in Central Java would continue for seven days unless miners were found before then.
“When the water entry point has been closed and the [pool of water] has dried up we will do a follow-up assessment,” he said.
“Thank God, it’s sunny, the weather is good. We hope it doesn’t rain.”
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