AMASARA: Rescue workers found the body of the last missing miner from a coal mine in northern Turkey on Saturday, bringing the death toll from the previous day’s methane explosion to 41.
A mine exploded near the small coal-mining town of Amasra on Turkey’s Black Sea coast shortly before sunset on Friday.
Shortly after arriving at the scene on Saturday afternoon, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the body of the last missing person had been found.
“Our priority was to find the miners in the gallery. We finally reached the last one. He also died, taking the death toll to 41,” he said, ending rescue operations more than 20 hours after the deadly blast. said while doing
Interior Minister Suleiman Swallow had previously said that 58 miners had survived the blast, “either by themselves or thanks to rescuers”.
He said that 28 people have been injured as a result of the explosion.
Television images late Friday showed anxious crowds – some with tears in their eyes – gathering around a ruined white building near the entrance to the crater, looking for news of their friends and loved ones.
Erdogan had earlier vowed on Twitter that the incident would be fully investigated.
Most of the initial information about people trapped inside came from workers who managed to get out relatively unscathed.
But Amasara Mayor Risai Kekar ​​said many of the survivors had suffered “serious injuries”.
Turkey’s Maden Is mining workers’ union blamed the explosion on methane gas build-up.
But other officials said it was too early to draw final conclusions about the cause of the crash.
Disaster of 2014
Rescue teams were dispatched from nearby villages to assist in the search and rescue.
Television footage showed paramedics giving oxygen to miners who had climbed out, then taking them to nearby hospitals.
A team of more than 70 rescue workers has managed to reach a point about 250 meters down into the crater, the local governor said.
Turkey’s AFAD disaster management service said the initial spark that caused the blast came from a faulty transformer.
It later retracted the report and said the methane gas had ignited for “unknown reasons”.
The local public prosecutor’s office said it is treating the incident as an accident and opening a formal investigation.
Turkey suffered its deadliest coal mining disaster in 2014 when an explosion in the western town of Soma killed 301 workers.
