{"id":570054,"date":"2010-05-19T01:59:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T05:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13049624.post-3671013677099047891"},"modified":"2010-05-19T01:59:57","modified_gmt":"2010-05-19T05:59:57","slug":"karadon-zonguldak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/570054","title":{"rendered":"Karadon Zonguldak"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Turkey prays for miners trapped underground
Turkey is focused on the fate of 30 workers trapped deep underground in a mine in Zonguldak following a methane gas explosion.<\/p>\n

The explosion that buried the workers 540 meters underground at the state-run Turkish Hard Coal Enterprises (TTK) Karadon mine on Monday drew the entire country’s attention to this northwestern province. However, despite all efforts, the miners had not been rescued by the time Today’s Zaman went to print. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Y\u0131ld\u0131z said fallen rock was hampering rescue efforts but that the teams were doing their best to reach the trapped miners.<\/p>\n

Five separate rescue teams made up of 400 men were deployed to the mine hours after the incident occurred on Monday. They started working in shifts under difficult circumstances to extract the victims. They dug a passage early yesterday but it collapsed, and they were then forced to approach the miners from a different route, more than 2,000 meters away from the site of the explosion. A member of the rescue team collapsed due to a lack of oxygen while working underground. He was treated in one of the ambulances standing by to take the miners to hospitals if they are successfully rescued.<\/p>\n

Labor Minister \u00d6mer Din\u00e7er said there were reports suggesting that the methane gas concentration was not very high in some parts of the collapsed mine and that the trapped workers might still be alive if they were in one of these sections of the mine.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are keeping our hopes alive. We hope that our fears will not be realized,\u201d Din\u00e7er said, adding later in the day that as time passed their hopes were decreasing. He also said there was no visible violation of safety rules but that the reason behind the explosion has not yet been ascertained. Din\u00e7er noted that their primary focus was not on looking for who was responsible for the explosion but on rescuing those trapped.<\/p>\n

Turkish Red Crescent (K\u0131z\u0131lay) President Tekin K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fckali said their teams were working without stop to help the people waiting near the mine for news on the rescue efforts. \u201cOur state and the government have put all their resources to use to rescue those workers. Three ministers are dealing with the matter personally. Our teams are on 24-hour duty,\u201d said K\u00fc\u00e7\u00fckali, adding that they provided soup on Monday night and meals yesterday while also affording professional psychological counseling for relatives waiting for their loved ones to be rescued.<\/p>\n

Civil Servants\u2019 Trade Union (Memur-Sen) issued a written statement following the blast yesterday and said the incident has led to immense sorrow across Turkey. \u201cWe expect those 30 workers trapped to be safely rescued and good news to be delivered to their families, friends and the entire nation as soon as possible,\u201d the statement read, adding that \u201cit is our the most natural right to expect all those accidents that happened because the required safety measures were not met or because of inspection deficiencies and negligence to come to an end. Although the state having the means to rescue them is pleasing, the best work to do is to prevent similar accidents from happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deadly mine blasts have been a common occurrence in Turkey. The explosion at the mine in Zonguldak was the third mine explosion in the country in the past six months. In February, a methane gas explosion collapsed an underground chamber in a coal mine in the northwestern province of Bal\u0131kesir, killing 13 workers. Nineteen miners were killed in Bursa in December of last year in a similar accident. Both accidents led to national grief when images of the workers\u2019 families weeping helplessly hit television screens. However, little has been done to take necessary measures to prevent another such tragedy from happening. In country\u2019s worst mining disaster, a gas explosion killed 270 miners near Zonguldak in 1992.<\/p>\n

Victims\u2019 families in desperate wait<\/p>\n

In the meantime, victims\u2019 families waited tirelessly all day near the mine\u2019s entrance. Some have more than one relative trapped deep in the mine. Ay\u015fe Aklin\u2019s son, son-in-law and nephew are trapped underground. \u201cI told my son not to go and work in the mine and that I would take care of him by selling milk, but he took this job,\u201d she said, with her eyes full of tears. G\u00fcl\u015fen Karabekta\u015fo\u011flu, with her 6-year-old daughter Ebrar, was waiting for her husband to be rescued. \u201cMy husband faced danger when he passed out a month ago after being poisoned by gas. However, he could not quit the job because we are renting our house. He, in fact, is a cook but started working there almost five years ago due to financial difficulties,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

19.05.2010, News, TODAY\u2019S ZAMAN WITH WIRES<\/p>\n

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Turkey prays for miners trapped undergroundTurkey is focused on the fate of 30 workers trapped deep underground in a mine in Zonguldak following a methane gas explosion. The explosion that buried the workers 540 meters underground at the state-run Turkish Hard Coal Enterprises (TTK) Karadon mine on Monday drew the entire country’s attention to this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4032,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4032"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}