Rescue miners team enter the Rudna copper mine in Polkowice, southern Poland, on March 20, 2013. The 19 miners were rescued alive from a copper mine after a minor earthquake trapped them 600 metres below the surface late the previous night. Rescue teams needed seven hours to reach the miners. (MACIEJ KULCZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Nineteen miners who were trapped underground were rescued by Polish rescue workers on Wednesday.
The miners were trapped for around eight hours after a small earthquake collapsed a tunnel in Rudna copper mine in Lower Silesia, reported the BBC.
A spokesperson for KGHM, the largest copper mine operator in Poland, said the miners were trapped 2,000 feet underground. He said the rescue effort proved to be difficult because “huge amounts of rocks have to be removed.”
“It was a very difficult rescue action,” Grzegorz Wolak, who headed the rescue effort, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press. “We did not know if they would live.”
The rescuers worked through the night to find the trapped miners, who were in a ventilated area when the tunnel collapse took place.
Rescuer Tomasz Szafirowicz said that the miners “were very tired but very happy to see us.”
“This was the biggest accident in KGHM history,” mine Chief Executive Herbert Wirth told Reuters. “Never in our history has it happened that 19 miners were trapped with no contact.”
Following the quake on Tuesday, the miners lost contact with workers on the surface due to broken communication lines.
One of the miners suffered minor head injuries but the others were not injured and could go home, reported AP.
The mine is located around 250 miles southwest of Warsaw. Poland has a large amounts of mines, with most of them located in the Silesia region. KGHM is the second-largest copper miner in Europe.
