Body extracted from flooded Meghalaya rat-hole coal mine

A body was extracted on Thursday from the flooded coal mine in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district where 15 miners were trapped inside since December 13. The recovery, made 43 days after the accident, has raised hopes of locating the other miners, dead or alive. District officials said an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), a robot with an electronic eye and mechanical arms, of the Navy fished out the decomposed body from a depth of about 170 feet below the water level in the 355-ft. shaft of the mine. The body had slipped out of the grip of the robot on January 22 after it was brought out of a lateral rathole mine at a depth of about 160 feet from the bottom of the shaft. It was located late on January 23 evening. There are several such lateral ratholes branching out of the main vertical shafts. “Two teams comprising three Navy divers, two National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel and one cadaver specialist from the Khliehriat Civil Hospital were lowered by a crane with an inflatable boat. The body was packed in a bag and brought up,” a spokesperson of the operation said. Khliehriat is the East Jaintia Hills district headquarters about 40 km from the mine at Khloo Ryngksan, or Ksan. The body was handed over to the officer in charge of the local Saipung police station in the presence of the district’s Deputy Commissioner Federick M. Dopth and District Health Officer Mitul Sangma. Officials said samples of the body could be sent for forensic test after the customary postmortem. 26 rathole branches The ROVs engaged by the Navy as well as Planys Technologies — a Chennai-based firm — located 26 lateral ratholes branching out from the main shaft of the mine since December 30, 2018. A rathole along a coal seam is so named because it is about 2 feet in height and a miner has to crawl inside to cut coal. “We located five major tunnels, three with dead-ends. In the other two, there were several smaller tunnels branching out left and right. For a better idea, imaging the veins of a leaf or the lines of a palm,” a member of a search and rescue agency said, declining to be quoted. The body that was brought out on Thursday was located a week ago 210 feet inside one of the two major tunnels that are expected to be explored on January 25. Source: The Hindu