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NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2007
CHINA
Families blame country leaders for trapped miners
Associated Press
Rescue workers attempt to plug a breach in a dike that broke last Friday, resulting in flood water flowing into the Huayuan Mining Co. coal mine in Xintai, in eastern China. Angry relatives protested and demanded answers Sunday as救難 efforts sputtered ahead for 181 trapped miners.
BY CHARLES HUTZLER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
XINTAI, China - Fear of flooding forced several coal mines to suspend production in eastern China last week, officials said Monday, raising questions about why 181 miners who became trapped when a dike broke continued to work.
Rescue workers pumped water from the Huayuan Mining Co. mine on Monday, but hopes were fading quickly for the 172 workers trapped three days earlier when the dike on the Wen River split open under heavy rains, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Another nine were trapped in another mine in the area.
A group of about eight relatives of Huaytan miners smashed windows and overturned a desk at a mining company office before storming the main compound, where they staged a sit-down protest. It was the most violent display by families desperate for word on their loved ones.
They demanded that Huavuan officials, who have been tightlipped with information on rescue efforts, give them updates three times a day.
Liu Xinjia, whose brother is believed to be among the missing, left the demonstration in a huff, shouting, "the leaders don't do anything!"
The rest were eventually escorted out.
The area in Shandong province
nearly 370 miles southeast of Beijing is pockmarked with mines. Several other mines stopped production Friday, hours before the dike burst.
Wang Dequan, a government official in the city of Taian, which oversees Xintai, the area where Huayuan is located, said smaller mines stopped work during heavy rains because they lack the safety equipment that larger mines like the Huayuan mine have.
"After the incident, we received a notice from the city administration for coal mine safety that production should be suspended at all mines in Xintai," a said a man at the administrative office of the state-owned Xintai Wenhe Coal Mine, who gave only his surname, Wang.
Rescue officials and state media have given no indication if the trapped miners are still alive.
"We've determined the general location of the miners, the general area. There's still some hope," said Bu Changsheng, a water engineer-ing expert involved in the rescue. "The water level has already started to fall."
Four industrial pumps were in place and two more were expected to be operational by Monday night. Officials were trying to deploy them deep into the shaft but had to drill holes in some places to get the pumps in.
Bu said it would take two days for the pumps to reach the bottom of the mine.
VIRGINIA TECH
--where Cho killed all but two of his victims. On Monday, flowers lay at entrance to the building, now being used exclusively for engineering laboratories and offices.
Not long after shooting carbon monoxide leak sickens five students
BY SUE LINDSEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
BLACKSBURG, Va. — A Virginia Tech campus still reeling from the deaths of 32 people at the hands of a student gunman last spring began its fall semester Monday amid another tragedy: a carbon monoxide leak at an off-campus apartment left five roommates hospitalized, two in critical condition.
On campus Monday morning, the school routine was back as thousands of Virginia Tech students hustled off to their first classes of the semester.
The leak appeared to be from a faulty valve in a gas water heater in the apartment the students shared, Blacksburg Police Capt. Bruce Bradbery said.
Two students from the apartment complex remained in critical condition Monday at the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville, a spokeswoman said. Their three roommates were in stable condition at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. Eighteen other people sickened by the carbon monoxide were treated Sunday and released, Blacksburg police said.
The leak was discovered Sunday morning after a neighbor complained of fumes, just as Virginia Tech was preparing to dedicate a memorial to the 27 students and five faculty members killed April 16 by Seung-Hui Cho.
Associated Press
One change on campus is Norris Hall, the former classroom building
Virginia Tech students, dealing with another tragedy this fall, walk past Norris Hall, the site of 32 killings last April.
The 32 stones engraved with the names of those killed replaced smaller stones that a student group placed in a semicircle in front of the administration building right after the killings.
"The spirit and resilience of the Virginia Tech community have amazed the world," university president Charles Steger told more than 10,000 at the memorial dedication. "As the academic year begins, we must maintain that optimism."
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