Beijing, July 2 (IANS) Three people died and 19 others were trapped in a caved-in coal mine in south China Saturday evening.
A 16-man rescue team was busy digging through the coal mine in search of the miners trapped underground. It had already found three bodies, Xinhua reported.
According to Meng Qingguan, head of the work safety bureau of Heshan, the miners were buried around Saturday noon at a coal mine located in rural areas of the city of Heshan in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
The accident occurred after rain-saturated earth on the surface collapsed into a shaft, Meng said while blaming days of heavy rain for the cave-in.
The miners are trapped at a depth of 390 metres. The size of the cave-in earth is about 7,000 cubic metres, rescuers said.
Another 50 miners who were working underground at the time of the cave-in, however, managed to escape.
