By Dipankar Roy
NONGKHLIEH (EAST JAINTIA HILLS): Half a saucepan of cooked rice, scattered cooking utensils and stoves on the floor, clothes hanging from pegs on walls or mixed up with crumpled blankets on cots were indications that the thatched rooms of the miners’ barrack had been lived in even till the other day.
“They could not probably even finish the rice or pack and take away their belongings once they realised what had happened,” a police official said. “They would just have fled,” he said.
Not only “fled”, they appear to have vanished into thin air.
In yet another accident, 13 miners got trapped while illegally mining for coal in a mine here after it was flooded early on Thursday.
Through Friday, despite deep divers of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) from Guwahati going inside the mine in search for the trapped miners twice, there was no trace of them.
“From the ground level, the surface of the water is about 250 feet and then to the bed of the shaft it is another about 75 feet,” an NDRF official said. It is from the bed that several coal-bearing tunnels, where the miners would have been clawing with implements for the black diamond, branch off in different directions.
Two teams comprising about 70 men from the NDRF’s1st Battalion are on the job.
“Mushkil hain (it’s difficult),” said one of them soon after returning from a dive. In the sun-kissed swathe of uneven terrain pockmarked by closed coal mines, the words bore a certain chill.
“The tunnels would be too narrow and low to allow passage or manoeuvrablity to divers with oxygen cylinders strapped to their backs,” he said.
About a hundred metres away from the pithead, a pipe gushed out water that was being pumped out from the flooded mine. But even after several hours, the two five-hp pumps could make very little difference; by the end of the day, the administration had brought in more pumps but the level would not just drop.
“Water must be coming into the mine from somewhere,” the NDRF official said, adding that if the water did not recede from the mine all efforts could turn out to be futile.
What also stood in the way of the rescuers’ progress was inadequate information about the layout of the mine. “We are told there may be about 10 tunnels, each about 200-300-foot long. That’s not enough to work on,” he said. “We haven’t found anyone who would have worked in this mine,” he said.
They wouldn’t, too. For, some of those who might have known have made themselves scarce while the others are those the NDRF is looking for.
As the NDRF men packed up for the day to return tomorrow, and others retraced their steps over an approximately two-kilometre dirt track that crosses three rivulets to meet the road, two mounds of freshly-extracted coal stood out in sharp relief, silhouetted against the setting sun — brought out by men now trapped inside.