Fourteen people were killed and two seriously injured in an early morning explosion yesterday at the Beitashan Coal Mine in Qitai County, about 150 kilometres east of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The explosion happened at 1 am yesterday morning at the workers' dormitory. One of the workers illegally brought back some detonators and explosives.

In Xingtai in southern Hebei Province, the death toll at the gypsum mines that caved in had risen to 31 by yesterday evening.

Among the dead were 14 miners and 17 miners' family members who lived in the residential buildings.

Four were missing and 33 injured in the collapse on Sunday night.

In Shanxi Province, all the 16 bodies of the killed miners had been found after a gas blast at the Taiping Coal Mine in Qingxu County near Taiyuan, the provincial capital, on Sunday morning. Fourteen of them were migrant workers from Southwest China's Sichuan Province and two were locals.

Preliminary investigation showed the blast was caused by improper operation.

The Taiyuan municipal government has ordered all the city's coal mines to stop production following two recent major coal mine accidents.

Zhao Tiechui, director of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, said at a meeting on Monday that the number of the coal mines closed should not be less than 4,000 by the end of this year. There are around 23,500 coal mines in China, most of them small ones.

Zhao said 12,148 of the coal mines across the country had been ordered to stop production while efforts are made to improve conditions and prevent future accidents. So far, 1,870 had been closed.

A regulation set by the administration stipulates that all those suspended coal mines will be closed by the end of this year if they fail to implement the safety reforms.

Zhao criticized some local governments' inefficiency and delay in the work.

To tackle the country's woeful safety record, China's work safety watchdog on Monday ordered coal mine owners and managers to accompany miners underground on every shift.

Their primary job would be to find and deal with any potential dangers before they turn into a disaster.

(China Daily November 9, 2005)