Bogotá (EFE).- At least four dead miners and 17 trapped left an explosion in a coal mine in the town of Sutatausa, in the Colombian department of Cundinamarca, in the center of the country, official sources reported on Wednesday.
The explosion occurred Tuesday night in the El Cajon area, where dozens of miners were working in several underground galleries from which coal is extracted manually, authorities said.
“The last report we have, at 5:20 in the morning, on the situation that occurred in a mine in the municipality of Sutatausa, in the village of El Cajón, is of two people recovered alive, four bodies recovered deceased and 17 people who they are still trapped in the mines,” said the governor of Cundinamarca, Nicolás García.
According to the governor, lifeguards from the National Mining Agency (ANM), firefighters, the Red Cross, Civil Defense and other organizations “continue to rescue the municipality” of Sutatausa, located about two hours north of Bogotá.
For his part, the director of the National Disaster Risk Management Unit (UNGRD), Javier Pava, said that the explosion affected three mines that are interconnected and “are part of a mining complex.”
In the department of Cundinamarca and neighboring Boyacá there are hundreds of coal mines in which thousands of miners work, not always with the necessary safety conditions, which has caused several accidents with fatalities over the last decades.