Miracle in the Mines

Three miners survived 25 days trapped in a flooded mine in southern China by drinking dirty water and chewing coal before rescuers burrowed through a collapsed tunnel to reach them, a local official and state media said Monday.
The men and 13 others became stuck when the Xinqiao Coal Mine flooded June 17. On Sunday, rescue workers digging into the mountainside cleared a path to the miners and saw their lights, which still gave off a dim glow, said Wang Guangneng, a Communist Party spokesman in the Guizhou province county of Qinglong.
The miners stayed alive by drinking water that seeped through the earth, Wang said. The official Xinhua News Agency cited a rescuer saying that oxygen was also able to get into the tunnel easily.
They also chewed on coal to stave off their appetite, the Guiyang Evening News, based in the provincial capital, reported.
It was not clear whether the men had any information on the others still missing. Rescuers had found the body of one miner a week after the flooding, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
A Xinhua photo showed one of the rescued miners, Wang Kuangwei, his bones prominent through his skin, getting medical attention Sunday, with his eyes covered to protect them from the light. The party spokesman said the three men were in stable condition.
During an interview with Shenzhen Media Group television, one of the miners, 36-year old Zhao Weixing, who was lying down with his eyes and face covered, told reporters: "I feel OK."
The miners' rescue after 604 hours underground was a rare tale of survival in China's coal mines, the world's deadliest, where an average of 13 workers are killed every day. Most accidents are blamed on failures to follow safety rules, including a lack of required ventilation or fire control equipment.
In August 2007, two brothers were forced to chew on coal and sip their own urine from discarded water bottles after nearly six days in a mine tunnel. They even managed to crack jokes during that time about their wives remarrying after they were declared dead.
In Sunday's rescue, the miners — all of whom were from central Henan province — were found 500 to 600 yards (meters) from the entrance to the mine shaft, on a level intersection that protected them from the flood, the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper reported. The ceiling had collapsed, blocking a path to the tunnel opening.
The county's head of work safety, Li Xingwei, was digging a channel into the mountain and found an unblocked pathway, then noticed the miners' lights, the newspaper said.
"We crept along the tunnel in excitement," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.
Rescuers shouted to the men to remain calm, the Beijing Youth Daily report said.
Once rescued, it said, the miners did nothing but ask for water.

Lone Survivor

A young girl believed to be the only survivor of an Indian Ocean plane crash flew back to Paris from the Comoros Islands on Thursday to the waiting arms of her father.

Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France on a plane carrying a government minister and other French officials. The Falcon-900 jet with medical facilities aboard left the archipelago nation of the Comoros, a former French colony, and arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed Tuesday morning off Comoros amid heavy winds, and Bahia, described by her father as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent over 13 hours in the water clinging to plane wreckage before she was rescued.

The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother, are presumed dead. It is not clear that Bahia knows her mother is dead because her uncle who visited her Wednesday at a Comoros hospital was too heartbroken to break the news. Instead, he told Bahia that her mother was also recovering.

Bahia's father, Kassim, met the plane, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife.

"It was very powerful," he said of his reunion with Bahia. He said he asked her,"'How are you? Was the return trip OK?' ... We joked a little, the two of us."

Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the girl to the Armand-Trousseau Children's Hospital in eastern Paris.

"In the midst of the mourning, there is Bahia. It is a miracle, it is an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival," France's government minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, said at a news conference at the airport.

Bahia, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for a long journey via Marseille and San'a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer school holidays with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.

When found hanging on to a piece of the plane, Bahia was suffering from hypothermia, a broken collarbone and bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.

Joyandet said the girl recounted her ordeal a bit to him.

"She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity ... as if she had been a bit electrocuted," Joyandet said. "And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water — and you know the rest."

The minister praised her strength and courage.

"It's an enormous message that she sends to the world ... almost nothing is impossible," said Joyandet, who accompanied the girl back to France. "We will do everything we can to help her."

He noted that 152 other people on the plane are still missing and vowed "the Comoros and France are arm-in-arm to find out everything that happened."

Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and U.S. ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and plane wreckage Thursday, even as hope in finding anyone alive in the choppy seas faded.

"Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor," said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. "Do we continue to hope to find survivors? Yes, we will continue to hope."

In the coastal town of Mitsamiouli, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from Moroni, the capital of Comoros, rescue boats went to sea. Dozens of Red Crescent tents were set up on shore and about 100 French, American, Yemeni and Comoran military personnel gathered to aid the search effort.

Ramoulati Ben Ali, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent Society of Comoros, said because of the "the wind, the rough sea, we have not been able to recover any bodies."

A 16-member U.S. search-and-rescue team arrived in Moroni late Wednesday after being asked to come by the Comoros government, a U.S. diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He declined to give further details.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA was sending a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

A respected pilots group, the London-based International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association, said the plane may have been attempting a go-around in rough weather for another approach when it hit the sea.