An explosion at a coal mine in central Colombia on Thursday killed seven people, authorities said Friday after finding the bodies of four miners who were missing.
“According to a final assessment […], we have found four dead bodies that we are recovering,” Alvaro Farfan, from the Cundinamarca department fire department (center), told reporters.
The accident occurred around 1 a.m. Thursday in the municipality of Cucunuba, some 90 kilometers north of Bogota.
According to the authorities, the explosion, which occurred in a tunnel connecting the El Roble and El Manto mines, was due to an accumulation of gas inside the galleries.
The same day, the rescuers found the bodies of three miners and, since then, they have been looking for four other workers who have been trapped. These tragedies are frequent in Colombia, especially in the illegal mines of Cundinamarca and other departments in the center and northeast of the country.
In mid-March, an explosion in the municipality of Sutatausan, located in the department of Cucunuba, killed 21 people, one of the worst tragedies in recent years in the country.
The inhabitants of these regions agree to work for the mining sector, which offers them better wages than the Colombian minimum wage which is just over 200 dollars.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy recorded 1,262 such accidents between 2011 and May 2022, an average of 103 fatalities per year.
