NEW DELHI, Jan 6: At least 18 labourers are feared trapped feared trapped in a flooded 300-foot deep ‘rat hole’ coal mine in Umrangso, a remote industrial town in Dima Hasao district in Assam on Monday.
Water has reached about 100 feet of the illegal quarry, sources said. Police and rescue teams have reached the spot and using two motor pumps to pump out the water. Teams of the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) have left for the area that is close to the Meghalaya border.
There is no clarity how water seeped into the mine but a preliminary police report, citing some locals, said four to six workers have been trapped inside the pit since about 8 a.m. on Monday. The spot is about 30 km from the nearest police station at Umrangso and takes about seven hours to reach from Haflong, the district headquarters.
“The place is very remote and is accessible through a jungle. We received information about the mishap at 2 p.m. Since the place is difficult to reach, we will get the actual picture after reaching the place tomorrow (Tuesday) morning,” Dima Hasao’s District Commissioner, Simanta K. Das said.
He said a State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) team has been readied for the rescue operation while officials of the Assam Mines and Minerals Department, which handles mining matters, have been instructed to assess the situation and find details about the mine’s owner. “We may engage National Disaster Response Force personnel depending on what the SDRF finds out,” Mr Das said.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said the state has requested the Army’s assistance in the ongoing rescue operation.
Disasters in coal mines across the northeast, mostly of the hazardous rat-hole kind, are frequent. “Rat hole” mining is a hazardous technique where narrow tunnels are manually dug by workers. These tunnels lead to deep pits from which coal is mined. They also harm the environment because the acidic water and heavy metals discharged from the mines are toxic to water sources used for agriculture and human consumption.
In January 2024, a fire in a coal mine in Nagaland’s Wokha district killed six workers and injured four others. In May of that year, three miners were killed in Assam’s Tinsukia district when the mine they were working in caved in. In September 2022, the suspected inhalation of toxic gas killed three labourers in an illegal rat-hole coal mine in Tinsukia district.
Among the biggest disasters in about a decade was the death of at least 15 miners in a flooded illegal rat-hole coal mine in the East Jaintia Hills district in Meghalaya after water from a nearby river gushed into it. In 2019, Meghalaya was fined Rs 100 crore by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for failing to curb illegal coal mining in the state. The NGT had found that most of the 24,000 mines in the state were illegal.
(Manas Dasgupta)