Chilcote: Mine flooding 'at an absolutely startling rate'
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CNN correspondent Ryan Chilcote
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NOVOSHAKHTINSK, Russia (CNN) -- Rescuers in Russia are racing time and rising water to reach more than 40 miners trapped underground in a coal mine. CNN correspondent Ryan Chilcote spoke to CNN anchor Heidi Collins about rescue efforts.
CHILCOTE: Forty-six miners are still trapped about a half-mile beneath where I'm standing right now in what is known here as the Zapadnaya mine. That's Russian for "the western mine," in this southern Russian city. They have been trapped in this mine down there now for 27 hours; 27 hours ago, it was 7:00 p.m. here, 71 people [were] at work in the mine, when water started to flood into that mine from a nearby mine that had been abandoned [and] in which groundwater was accumulating. ... The pressure of that water accumulating in that nearby mine became so great that ... it literally forced its way into this mine and has been flooding this mine at an absolutely startling rate.
Yesterday, it was flooding the mine [at a] rate of three feet every minute. Now it's filling up about three feet per hour.
There's a quick rescue effort going on right now [in which] miners [are] trying to fill up one shaft to stop the water flow. They are also trying to dig a tunnel to those miners. They have no communication with them, however. Apparently, we've just learned that some scuba divers have been bought in. The idea is that perhaps those scuba divers may even have to swim through that water to try to find those miners who may be trapped inside of a pocket of air down in the mine.
COLLINS: Ryan Chilcote, thanks for the update.
