Death toll jumps to 90 in China coal mine blast
Death toll jumps to 90 in China coal mine blast
Over 240 miners were underground at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi Province when the accident occurred on Friday night.
BEIJING: The death toll from a gas explosion at a coal mine in northern China’s Shanxi province has jumped to 90, state media reported on Saturday (May 23), in the country’s deadliest coal mine disaster in over a decade.
The blast occurred at 7.29pm on Friday at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi province.
A total of 247 workers were underground at the time, most of whom were brought to the surface by Saturday morning, Xinhua said.
Nine people remain missing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called on authorities to “spare no effort” in treating the injured and conducting search and rescue operations, while ordering a thorough investigation into the cause of the accident.
Premier Li Qiang echoed the instructions, calling for timely and accurate release of information and rigorous accountability.
Executives of the company responsible for the mine have been detained, Xinhua reported.
Footage published by state broadcaster CCTV showed helmeted rescuers carrying stretchers at the site, with ambulances visible in the background.
According to People’s Daily, 156 people have been rescued. A total of 870 medical staff members, rescuers and police officers have been deployed.
The death toll was a sharp rise from the eight fatalities reported on Saturday morning. Xinhua said in an earlier report that dozens were trapped underground after levels of carbon monoxide were found to have “exceeded limits”. Some of those trapped underground were in “critical condition”, the report said.
China has significantly reduced coal mine fatalities - often caused by gas explosions or flooding - since the early 2000s through more stringent regulations and safer practices. The Liushenyu incident, though, was one of the deadliest reported in China in the past decade.
According to official data from the National Mine Safety Administration (NMSA), over 3,000 mine accidents occurred in China between 2010 and 2025.
Just last month, four people were found dead after a roof collapsed at a coal mine in Xingxian county, Shanxi. In 2023, a collapse at an open-pit coal mine in the northern Inner Mongolia region killed 53 people.
Shanxi, one of China’s poorer provinces, is the country’s coal-mining capital.
China is the world’s top consumer of coal and the largest greenhouse gas emitter, despite installing renewable energy capacity at record speed.