The country’s energy minister Taner Yildiz says the death toll has been raised to 166. About 200 people are still believed to be trapped inside the mine, some of them 420 metres deep down. Emergency crews are frantically trying to reach survivors.
Early Tuesday afternoon, a power distribution unit exploded inside a western Turkey coal mine causing a power outage and making the elevators unusable.
Officials with the state disaster response unit say 70 miners were killed, while hundreds of workers were trapped some two kilometres underground and four kilometres from the mine’s entrance.
Provincial Mayor Cengiz Ergun is estimating that fatalities could be as high 157.
Those rescued by emergency teams have been rushed to local hospitals, while fire officials pump clean air into other mine shafts for those who remain inside.
Turkey’s Energy Minister Taner Yildiz is heading to the site to oversee the rescue operation.
The Soma Coal Mining Company, who operates the mine, says it passed the latest inspection, carried out two months ago.
As many as four separate rescue teams are now working well into the night to find survivors.
Unfortunately Turkey’s coal mining industry has a poor safety record.
The country’s worst mining disaster was in 1992, when 270 miners were killed in the northern Turkish province of Zonguldak, on the Black Sea.
Earlier this year, eight were killed in the same province when a gas leak caused an explosion in a coal mine.
This comes at a time when Turkey and China are negotiating a possible 12 billion investment deal for the Afsin-Elbistan coalfield and power plant project in southern Turkey.