GUWAHATI/JOWAI/SHILLONG: Mining expert, Jaswant Singh Gill, who had saved the lives of 64 miners at a mine in Raniganj of West Bengal in 1989, will arrive at Ksan under Nongkhlieh Elaka in East Jaintia Hills district where 15 miners are said to be trapped inside a flooded rat-hole mine since the past week, on Thursday.
The number of trapped miners was scaled up to 15 from the initial 13 on Wednesday after a brother of one Ash Bahadur Limbu of 9th Mile, Nepali Basti, under Manja police station in Karbi Anglong district of Assam claimed he was also working in the coal mine and went missing.
Krishna Bahadur Limbu, the brother, said that he also worked in the killer coal mine but fortunately, he did not enter the shaft on the day of the incident. “Only my brother went inside, but never came back”, he said. “We came here the night before the incident”, he added.
Sources said Gill, who has received several awards for his act of bravery on that fateful night of November 16, 1989, has been requested to visit the site by the Meghalaya government after rescue operations carried out by NDRF and SDRF personnel since last Friday did not yield any positive result.
“In fact, the situation today (Wednesday) after yesterday’s incessant rain is even more disappointing after we found that the water levels in the main shaft and the Lytein river nearby have risen by more than two feet despite two 25hp pumps continuously extracting water from the shaft. Therefore, I do not think that such water extraction by pumps will work further,” Santosh Kumar, assistant commandant, NDRF (1st Battalion), told The Shillong Times on Wednesday evening.
“Tomorrow, we will check the water level again. A mining engineer, Jaswant Singh Gill, who has been honoured for his expertise in saving the lives of 64 miners in Bengal in 1989, is arriving here by Thursday morning and he will decide what needs to be done further,” Kumar informed.
Experts from the Directorate General of Mining Safety were earlier there at the site. “The administration has provided about four to five pumps but because they are old, they break down after four-five hours of continuous pumping. They are then repaired, but at any given time, at least two pumps have been kept operational,” he said.
The state government has also approached the Defence authorities in Shillong for assistance to rescue the miners. However, the Defence establishment here does not have the resources to pump out water from such a deep hole.
Defence PRO Wing Commander Ratnakar Singh said that the Defence establishment here does not have pumps which can pump water from 300-400 deep coal mines and they can pump water only up to a certain extent.
Meanwhile, Revenue and Disaster Management Minister Kyrmen Shylla on Wednesday admitted that there is little chance of the miners surviving.
He said that there are hundreds of coal mines in the area and even if the water is pumped out from all these, it would take at least a month.
Asserting that it is tough to empty the water from the coal mine, he said that it would require crores of rupees since all mines there are interconnected.
“We are trying our best to pump out the water, but the water level keeps on increasing again and again,” he said while adding that the rescue operation is difficult since operations are going on inside the coal mine and not in open air.
He also said that pumping out water from the coal mine is the only option now in the rescue operations.
Remembering 1989
“You only get one life, you need to make it count. Everything happened so suddenly that no one had the time to think. When I got to know that 65 miners were still trapped inside the coal mine, I told the chairman of Coal India, who was present there, that I was going inside. His immediate reaction was, ‘I cannot sacrifice a senior officer like you’. So, I assured him that I’ll return safe and have a cup of tea with him in the morning. Somebody had to bell the cat”
Jaswant Singh Gill (as quoted in The Tribune in 2016)