At least 74 miners were killed and some trapped under the ground - and feared dead - after a gas explosion rocked a large coal mine in Shanxi province Sunday morning.
The explosion occurred at 2:17 pm while 436 employees Tunlan Coal Mine were working underground at Gujiao, 60 km west of Taiyuan, the provincial capital of the rich coal.
Of 114 miners in the hospital, 26 were in critical condition last night, officials said.
More than 300 are believed to have escaped from a hole in the first hour of the explosion, including a lot of people treated in hospital, an employee who records the flow of workers to the China Daily.
He said the first batch of rescuers reached the site at around 3:20.
As many as 57 rescue teams, some from other places, including Taiyuan, involved in rescue operations, local police said.
But residents say Gujiao, the number was not enough.
"The rescue team here in this mine is very short as the headquarters based in Taiyuan," Kang Changqing, a former miner who lives in Tunlan nearby, told China Daily.
Although his village, Liangzhuang, is 3.5 km away, Kang, 46, said people there were the first to know about the explosion and called the police.
"The two intake portions of the hole - which links to the outside and provides fresh air into the mine - was built by the road outside my house," he said, adding that most of the village was awakened by "two huge explosions" at 2: 18 am.
When the explosion occurred more than 400 m below the ground, the mine was not the first observer to know about the accident, according to other villagers.
"The parts on the ground that consumed completely destroyed. Lucky for us, the explosion occurred at night when no one was around," said Kang.
After saving suspended for the day at 6 pm yesterday, the rescue headquarters confirmed that the death toll stood at 74, without announcing the number of miners were still trapped - or whether there had been trapped at all.
President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao issued instructions to all things that might be done to save those still trapped in the mine, CCTV reported.
Three days before the explosion, Wang Jun, the Governor of Shanxi, when reviewing the safety procedures for working in Taiyuan, the provincial warning - which often witness coal mine disaster - "had run out of tears to shed".
After climbing out of the hole off, several rescue teams wasted no time calling home on their mobile device.
"If I do not call them immediately, they will begin to worry about the safety and mental health," surnamed Zhao told China Daily the savior. "My family probably thought I was crazy after going through all this every time," he said.
Zhao, part of the provincial mine rescue team, started work immediately after reaching the hole in the morning and not come out until 5:30.
The Tunlan mine, which has a capacity of 5 million tons, operated by Jiaomei Shanxi Group.
The death toll yesterday made the most deadly accidents reported in the mining industry after 276 people died in the collapse of iron ore that does not have permission reservoir last September, also in Shanxi.
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