POLAND: Colleagues mourn after rescue teams confirm all 23 Polish miners trapped underground after blast are dead

All 23 Polish miners caught in a gas explosion in an underground mine in southern Poland were confirmed dead on Thursday (November 23). It is the country's worst mining disaster since the 1970s. Rescuers had worked through two nights in a desperate search for the men, most of whom had gone down into the pit in the town of Ruda Slaska, about 300 km (190 miles) southwest of Warsaw, to retrieve machinery. As rescuers hauled out the miners' equipment and a fresh shift arrived at the mine's other shafts, wives, brothers and parents of the dead men waited for results of the search in the mine's cafeteria. "I feel compassion and grief for the families. When I watch TV I feel like crying," said Stanislaw Barczyk, who was a miner for twenty five years before he retired. Outside the mine, rescue workers told reporters and family members that they had hoped for the best, but their search for survivors had been unsuccessful. "We went down to find the living, but after what happened we are sad because those were our friends, we knew them and worked with them for a long time," rescue team leader Jan Gaura said. "There is always hope. We always count on finding survivors, but this time it turned out differently. We can't do anything about this," another member of the rescue team Jerzy Liczyn said. Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who visited the mine on Wednesday (November 22), told reporters there would be a public inquiry into the cause of the disaster. He said he had indications that some of the miners were not experienced and not sufficiently qualified. It is expected the president will announce three days of national mourning, an official from the president's office told Polish television. According to Polish state coal company Kompania Weglowa, everything suggests the miners died at the moment of the explosion. "An explosion underground is hard to imagine for most people. The force is capable of destroying tons of hardware. A human can be lunged as far as several hundred meters from it," said mining expert and member of the crisis management group during the rescue operation, Zygmunt Goldstein. Doctors and psychologists helped the families into cars to be driven home, but according to doctor Michal Swierszcz, the worst is yet to come for the victims' family members. "First of all this is a giant tragedy for these people. The breakdown will come in a few days. At this time the shock is too big for them to realise that they lost their loved ones. After a few days there will be a breakdown when they notice that their home is empty, that the husband, father, or brother is missing, that the family is incomplete," Swierszcz said. The Polish mining industry has not experienced a death toll this high since a blast at another mine in the same Silesia region in 1979, killing 34 workers, according to the Polish news agency, PAP. The miners were in a shaft more than 1 km underground in the Halemba mine, one of the oldest in Poland, when Tuesday's (November 21) blast occurred. Poland's state-run mining industry, built up before the fall of communism in 1989 and starved of investment for years, has suffered more than 150 deaths over the last 30 years, PAP said. The Halemba mine, has been in operation since 1957 and lies at the heart of Silesia's industrial belt which has been the scene of several disasters. In 1990, 19 miners were killed in the same pit by a gas explosion.

ITN Source | November 24, 2006

Tags:. .lies. .imagine. .survivors. .sad. .retired