Mexican authorities seek to shorten time to rescue 10 missing miners

First modification: 08/26/2022 – 22:02

“The technicians are going to explore whether time can be shortened with more water extraction” from the flooded sinkhole so that rescuers can enter, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily press conference.

“The instruction (to the rescue team) is that we do not give up,” added the president.

On Thursday, Civil Protection presented family members with a new strategy to remove the workers that would take between six and eleven months, according to some of them.

This approach practically buries the hopes of the relatives of seeing their loved ones alive again.

“They proposed another option (…) which was to dig the ground to be able to enter, nothing more than that takes more time,” said López Obrador, without specifying the duration.

The president confirmed that the families rejected this possibility, so they are looking to go faster with the jobs that allow access to the coal mine, located in the community of Agujita (state of Coahuila, north).

“We are desperate, we don’t know what to do, we can’t accept this,” Juani Cabrales, sister of Mario Alberto Cabrales, one of the injured miners, told the AFP news agency on Thursday.

As explained on Thursday by the head of Civil Protection, Laura Velázquez, three “options” are being evaluated, one of which consists of opening a tunnel with “inclined access ramps” to reach the mine galleries, in addition to pumping water.

Since the incident occurred, there are no signs of life of the workers.

The initial strategy was for military divers to try to descend vertically through the wells where workers usually access, when the flood was just over a meter away.

But the water level suddenly rose to more than 100 feet on August 14 and has not dropped significantly.

Due to this, Civil Protection announced a change to seal before the fissures through which water seeps from a neighboring mine and abandoned 30 years ago, as well as to build a wall.

According to the government, these maneuvers were validated by two US companies.