Pumps may be put to use today

The renewed search for at least 13 miners trapped deep inside a water-filled coal mine in Meghalaya for the past 18 days did not yield any result on Sunday. The high-power pumps brought in by multiple agencies to drain the water out too could not be operated for technical reasons.

Officials said six divers of the Navy and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) spent four hours underwater surveying the interior of the submerged coal mine at Ksan in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills districts. The mine is about 350 ft deep with about 70 ft of water, officials said.

The miners are believed to be trapped in rat-holes from where they were possibly scraping out coal when the disaster struck. The mining was being carried out illegally in violation of an April 2014 ban by the National Green Tribunal.

Rat holes detected

Officials said the divers had detected some narrow rat-holes branching out of the main tunnel, some of them covered by debris indicating that the miners had either hit an aquifer or a huge volume of water had flooded in from an adjoining abandoned mine.

“One positive sign was that the Navy divers went much deeper than our limit of about 40 ft. They dived closer to the base of the pit and detected a few rat-holes. It was more of an assessment for taking sophisticated equipment down,” NDRF deputy commandant Santosh Kumar Singh said.

Expert opinion

The divers, he added, went in at 2 p.m. after a boat was lowered into the pit for use as a diving platform.

Mining expert Jaswant Singh Gill, who has been monitoring the rescue operation, said it might be possible to operate the high-power pumps on Monday after a platform is built over the level of the water. “If all the pumps are in operation, the water can be drained out within five days,” he said.

The pumps, according to officials of the Odisha Fire Service — one of the agencies along with Navy engaged in the operation — can be submerged in the pit that measures about 150 sq. ft.