Methane blast kills 32 miners at Quetta coal mine
Twenty-nine bodies have been pulled from the private coal mine in Sorange near Quetta and three more located underground, with trapped methane and a fire slowing the rescue.
At least 32 miners were killed by a methane explosion at a privately owned coal mine in the Sorange area of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, and on Friday, the second day of the operation, rescue crews were still working inside a pit where a fire is burning. Al Jazeera places the site about 50 kilometers east of Quetta, the provincial capital, while China’s Xinhua describes the mine as sitting on the city’s outskirts. Read from Serbia, where coal comes mostly out of the open pits of Kolubara and Kostolac, the disaster is a reminder that underground mining is a different trade altogether: down in the pit, the first thing you measure is gas.
The blast happened on Thursday, July 30, and was most likely caused by methane building up in the underground network of tunnels. Muhammad Atif, the province’s chief inspector of mines, confirmed that 36 miners were below ground at the time. Xinhua puts the figure at more than 40, a gap of the kind that usually closes only once the shift lists have been checked.
Where the rescue stands
By Friday, 29 bodies had been brought up. An official of Balochistan’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) laid out the state of the operation for reporters at the site:
We have recovered 29 bodies so far. Our rescuers have located three more bodies inside the mine and are trying to recover them.
Those three have been found but not yet brought out. The explosion started a fire that collapsed part of the mine, so crews cannot use every tunnel that was passable before Thursday. Abdul Ghani Baloch, a senior provincial mining official, said the blast also damaged two neighbouring mines.
Two things are holding the work back at once: methane still trapped in the pit, and a fire burning below the surface. Mining engineers are cutting alternative passages toward the men still inside. Rescue teams had already been working for more than twelve hours after the explosion when officials said the odds of finding anyone alive were slim.
Shoaib Nosherwani, the provincial minister for mines and minerals, said on July 31:
Rescue teams are continuing operations under extremely difficult conditions in order to reach the remaining workers trapped underground.
Provincial emergency services are on site alongside the PDMA.
Why do Balochistan’s mines keep killing?
Because much of the digging there happens in pits that lack what mining treats as the bare minimum: proper ventilation, gas detection systems and basic protective measures. Miners and their unions have spent years accusing owners of ignoring the rules and sending men down without safety gear, while inspection tends to arrive after an accident rather than before it.
This year’s record in Balochistan says the same thing, well before Thursday:
- in March, two miners suffocated at Chamalang in Duki district after methane built up
- in April, three miners died in the Degari area near Quetta when gas was released
- in June, two miners were killed in the Khost area of Harnai district in a cave-in
None of those three comes close to this week’s toll, yet all three share a cause: gas and an unstable roof in a pit with nothing installed to give warning in time.
Where the dead came from
The men caught underground came from Shangla district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, from the other end of the country, a region that has been supplying labour to Balochistan’s mines for decades. That is why a disaster near Quetta is felt in villages more than a thousand kilometres away.
Nosherwani announced compensation of 500,000 rupees for the family of each dead miner and 300,000 rupees for every injured worker. An investigation into the cause has been opened.
The first test of that inquiry will be whether it answers the question Balochistan asks after every blast of this kind: who last measured methane in that pit, when, and what the reading was.
