NEW DELHI: Indian authorities yesterday said they had all but given up hope of rescuing 15 coal miners trapped in a flooded mine hundreds of feet (meters) underground in the northeast of the country.

Blinding rains hampered efforts to rescue the miners stuck at depths of up to 200 meters (650 feet) since last Friday, Meghalaya state Director General of Police N. Ramachandran said by telephone from the state capital of Shillong.

“We have very little hope of getting them out alive as water has filled the coal pit which is between 100 and 200 meters deep,” Ramachandran told AFP.

Thirty miners were trapped when water gushed into a pit after they accidentally punched a hole in the wall of an adjacent mine in Rongsa Awe village, 370 km from Shillong, he said.

Fifteen of them escaped while the rest were trapped.

“These miners work in a labyrinth of tunnels as there is no scientific mining” of coal in Meghalaya, he said.

Ramachandran said a unit of the National Disaster Response Force had joined the rescue at the privately owned mine in Rongsa Awe.

“This is the planet’s rainiest zone and communication is also bad. Even police wireless sets do not work as the area is ringed by mountains,” he said as rescuers pumped out water from the coal pit.

“I am not at all hopeful they will survive,” he said.

Ramachandran said haphazard excavation is rampant in Meghalaya as land owners traditionally stake claim to coal deposits beneath their estates.

The mine owner failed to inform authorities immediately after the accident, the police chief added. The owner was now in police custody.

The miners were working in a “rat-hole” mine in which workers crawl into a tunnel and use primitive hand implements to extract coal, he said.

Meghalaya holds an estimated 640 million tons of coal that is mined mainly to generate electricity and to fuel operations in cement plants in India and neighboring Bangladesh.

India’s worst colliery disaster occurred in December 1975 when an estimated 372 miners perished after an explosion caused a flood in a mine in the coal-rich district of Dhanbad in eastern India.