Deep underground, Mexican coal miners keep in mind those that by no means got here again By Reuters

By Daniel Becerril

SABINAS, Mexico (Reuters) – Every time Juan Briones descends deep into the bottom of northern Mexico to dig for coal he is aware of he should steadiness incomes a residing and avoiding loss of life.

In August, his brother-in-law was certainly one of 10 miners trapped within the close by coal mine of El Pinabete as water broke by means of a shaft wall and flooded the tunnels the lads had been working in. Almost two months later, their our bodies have nonetheless not been recovered.

Miners know the dangers, Briones mentioned, however usually really feel they don’t have any selection.

“You’ve gotten the necessity to survive, to care for your loved ones,” the 35-year-old mentioned in a latest interview at his house after his spouse helped scrub off the black mud that had settled into his pores and skin after a day in a sweltering mine.

Briones has 4 sons, aged 6, 8, 10 and 15.

Even earlier than the El Pinabete mine catastrophe, he urged his eldest, who has left faculty, to keep away from the dangerous work to which he has devoted the previous twenty years of his life.

“It is a actually powerful job, particularly due to the accidents,” he mentioned. “I did not need the identical factor to occur to him, the place he goes to work within the mines with the dangers.”

Briones, who started within the mines when he was simply 14, works dozens of meters under floor with a helmet, gloves and steel-toed boots for cover, on alert for tumbling rocks, defective pulleys, poisonous fuel and underground flooding.

When he first goes down, he generally feels as if he cannot breathe. He emerges later drenched in sweat.

Briones lives within the city of Sabinas within the border state of Coahuila, the place jobs are scarce. He feels he has few choices that may match the roughly $150 he takes house every week.

His brother-in-law, Hugo Tijerina, had inspired him to work at El Pinabete. However Briones turned it down, saying he feared that enormous swimming pools of water in deserted mines close by might break by means of and flood it – which is simply what occurred Aug. 3 when excavation work triggered a tunnel wall to break down. Efforts to pump out the mine and rescue the miners finally failed.

The catastrophe highlighted the risks staff endure at small, unregulated mines in Mexico’s coal heartland the place folks like Briones are employed informally and paid in money to extract coal that fashioned within the earth within the Cretaceous interval thousands and thousands of years in the past.

El Pinabete, one of many many Coahuila mines tapped to supply coal to Mexico’s state energy utility, had not been visited by labor inspectors, Reuters reported final month. Mexican legislation doesn’t require such mines to be inspected earlier than opening.

It was not the primary tragedy at a Coahuila mine. In 2006, an explosion on the Pasta de Conchos mine killed 65 males. Solely two our bodies had been recovered.

Briones’ taut, lean body belies the energy he possesses to work as much as eight hours a day, wielding a pneumatic air gun to blast the rock and a shovel and cart to lug coal by means of underground tunnels.

He can earn 2,700 pesos ($135) hoisting 18 tons of coal above floor every week. The pay rises to three,300 pesos ($165) if he can ship an additional two tons – an incentive to push his physique more durable and sooner.

Briones, who wears a silver dangly crucifix earring, a reminder of his deep Catholic religion, trades playful barbs with fellow staff to make the hours cross sooner.

Nonetheless, he stays alert for risks. As he goes down into the darkness he thinks of his spouse’s brother and the opposite 9 who by no means returned.

“You are at all times terrified of not coming again,” Briones mentioned. “Once I’m working, down under, I keep in mind all of them.”

($1 = 20.1317 Mexican pesos)