The Associated Press
BEIJING — China’s top safety official has blasted “unscrupulous” mine owners and local officials after a string of accidents killed at least 88 miners in recent days, state media said Tuesday.
The China Daily reported an angry Li Yizhong, director of the State Administration of Work Safety, launched the attack on the mine owners and officials in a teleconference with safety officials around the country.
Four accidents over the weekend killed at least 81 people, and on Monday a coal heap collapsed at a mine in southwest China, entombing seven miners.
Li was quoted as saying “such a high frequency of serious accidents is unprecedented” and added that mine owners and local officials should be held responsible.
China’s mines are the world’s deadliest, with 6,000 workers — an average of more than 16 a day — dying every year in explosions, fires and floods, many caused by bad safety procedures and a lack of proper equipment.
The weekend accidents included one in the southwestern province of Yunnan that killed at least 32 miners in a gas explosion. Li said that accident should never have happened because the mine was ordered closed by his agency and the provincial government at the beginning of the year.
Although the local government claimed it had done so, it shut another small mine instead, the newspaper reported.
“It is like replacing a person on the death list with another,” Li said. “The case illustrates how some local governments are willfully flouting national safety regulations.”
Soaring demand for coal to supply heat for the winter has led to a string of fatal coal mine disasters.
Besides the Yunnan accident, 24 miners were killed when an explosion triggered by a gas buildup ripped through an unlicensed mine in northern China’s Shanxi province on Sunday.
In another big accident, in Jixi, a city in northeast Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua News Agency said 23 miners died in a gas explosion. Four miners are still missing.
Xinhua said the mine’s owner ignored an order from local authorities in August to stop production because the mine’s work certificates were outdated.
Two people were killed and another two are still missing after a mine gas blast on Sunday in Jiangxi province in eastern China, Xinhua said on Tuesday.
China has launched a program to close small mines, which account for most of the accidents, but mine owners inflate their output figures, often in collusion with local officials.
“Don’t let some unscrupulous coal mine owners kill more people in their last frenzy to make profit,” Li said.