Two miners trapped for more than nine days in a collapsed zinc mine in eastern South Korea were found and rescued alive Saturday morning, local authorities said.
The pair of miners, who had been trapped in a vertical shaft about 190 meters underground in a zinc mine in Bonghwa County, 244 kilometers southeast of Seoul, since the mine collapsed last Oct. 26, Yonhap news agency reported.
Rescue authorities said the miners emerged at 11 a.m. (local time) after 221 underground and are hospitalized, although they are in stable health condition.
Rescue teams began searching for the mine workers last Thursday by drilling a hole and inserting an endoscope in an effort to reach the spot where the two men had been trapped.
Specifically, rescuers believe that the miners would have set up a tent with plastic and built a fire inside a tunnel to shelter from the cold. In the meantime, they were subsisting on instant coffee powder that they brought with them when they went to work and drinking water that fell down the shaft after finishing their coffee, the agency said.
The president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, welcomed the news, assuring that it was a miraculous event.
«It is really a miracle. Two miners who were isolated in a zinc mine in Bonghwa were rescued safely (…) Many thanks to the rescuers of the fire department and mine rescuers who did their best in recent days,» he said on his Facebook account.
