Rescue workers initially fail to locate 2 miners trapped in zinc mine

Search and rescue operations for two miners trapped in a zinc mine in southeastern South Korea for six days are making little headway, officials said Tuesday.

The two miners, both surnamed Park, have been isolated in a vertical shaft about 190 meters underground at the zinc mine in the North Gyeongsang Province county of Bonghwa, 244 km southeast of Seoul, since a burial accident last Wednesday.

Rescue workers have been attempting to find whether the miners are alive by drilling a hole to their estimated burial point, but their initial effort failed Monday, the officials said.

A drilling machine with a diameter of 76 mm reached a depth of 185 meters underground, 15 meters deeper than the target dept of 170 meters, Monday afternoon after 32 hours of work, but the rescue workers could not even identify the whereabouts of the buried miners, they said.

An official of Korea Mine Rehabilitation and Mineral Resources Corp., which takes part in the rescue efforts, said the initial drilling operation appeared to have been done based on wrong coordinates.

He said the drilling operation will soon resume after new coordinates are set and an additional drilling machine will be sent there.

Rescue workers expect they will be able to check the survival of the trapped miners, and deliver medicine and water to them, if holes are successfully drilled by the two machines. (Yonhap)