One month on Meghalaya mine collapse, search continues to find 15 trapped miners

The fate of the 15 miners, stuck in a rat-hole mine in Meghalaya's East Jaintia Hills district for over a month, is still unclear. Joint-rescue efforts have been reinforced with the inclusion of additional high-power pumps, Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) and other equipment.

Coal India Limited (CIL) on Monday inserted a new pump in an old shaft of the mine. The pump has been successfully tested and pumping will start on Tuesday. Currently, the CIL team are fitting and laying down pipes in order to get the pump functional.

KSB, a German company, is preparing to install another high-power pump. KSB is expecting to get their pump operational from Tuesday.

An additional 22,68,000 litres of water has been pumped out from the mine by the CIL team since 6 pm on Sunday. The Odisha fire service also started operating their pump around 11 am today.

Meanwhile, Dr. Dewashish Kumar, a senior scientist from the Hyderabad-based National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), a constituent research laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), carried out an electric tomography survey to access the rock strata around the mine.

Also, a team from the IIT Madras-incubated company, Pelnys, is operating an ROV to survey a nearby shaft. Indian Navy divers are currently attempting to recover another ROV which got stuck in the mine on Sunday night.

15 miners have been trapped in the 370-feet deep illegal mine in Lumthari village since December 13 last year, when water from the nearby Lytein River flooded the mine. Since then, a multi-agency rescue operation has been attempting to evacuate the miners, albeit, with little success so far.