At least five people are dead and 48 more are still missing Thursday after a coal mine collapsed in China, according to state media. The disaster at the open-pit mine in the northern region of Inner Mongolia buried workers beneath a landslide estimated to be around 550 yards wide and 90 yards high. Around 300 rescue workers were sent to the scene with sniffer dogs and heavy machinery in a bid to free the men trapped under the rocks. One hospitalized miner told state broadcaster CCTV on Thursday that he’d just started his shift when he saw the landslide racing down the mountain toward him. “I saw that the situation was getting more and more serious, and an evacuation was organized, but it was too late, the mountain just collapsed,” he said. President Xi Jinping vowed “every possible effort” would be made to rescue the miners.
Video footage shows a collapse at a coal mine in northern China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, where several people have been killed and dozens are missing.
