Coal mine explosion in China kills 90 people, state media say

BEIJING (AP) — A gas explosion at a coal mine in China’s northern Shanxi province killed at least 90 people, state media said on Saturday, in the country’s deadliest mining accident in recent years.

Official news agency Xinhua said the accident at Changzhi city’s Liushenyu coal mine happened on Friday evening. Around 247 workers were on duty at the time.

Nine miners were still unaccounted for as of Saturday afternoon, Xinhua said, and more than 120 people were hospitalized.

The cause of the explosion was under investigation, Xinhua reported, and rescue work is pressing on with hundreds of rescuers and medical personnel sent to the site. Among the injured, many were hurt by toxic gas, according to state media CCTV.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for an all-out effort to rescue the missing, reported Xinhua.

Xi also called for the “proper handling of the aftermath of the accident and urged a thorough investigation into its cause, with accountability pursued in accordance with the law,” the news agency said.

Xinhua later reported that the “persons responsible for the company involved in the mine accident have been placed under control,” citing the local emergency management bureau.

The coal mine, operated by the Shanxi Tongzhou Coal & Coke Group with an annual production capacity of 1.2 million tons, was placed on a national list of disaster-prone coal mines by China’s National Mine Safety Administration in 2024 for having “high gas content.”

Shanxi province is known as China’s main coal mining province. With a size larger than Greece and a population of around 34 million, the province’s hundreds of thousands of miners dug 1.3 billion tons of coal last year, or almost a third of China’s total.

In February 2023, 53 people were killed after a collapse at an open-pit mine in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region. In November 2009, an explosion at a mine in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province killed 108, according to state media.