Explosion Kills 11 in Chinese Coal Town

BEIJING - Explosives stored at a coal mine manager's house blew up in northern China, killing him and at least 10 other people, including two students and a teacher at a nearby grade school, news reports and police said Thursday.

The mine manager, Lu Maolin, was killed, along with several family members in Wednesday's blast in Kecheng, a town in Shanxi province, according to an officer reached by phone at the county police station who would give only his surname, Li. He said several people were killed when a nearby clinic collapsed.

"We are investigating the cause of the explosion," Li said.

He denied a report by the newspaper Shanxi Commercial News that a school near Lu's house had collapsed, killing 20 students. He said that building was still standing.

The official Xinhua News Agency put the death toll at 11 and said it included two students and a teacher at the school.
Shanxi province, a major coal-mining region. China's coal mining industry is the world's deadliest, with thousands of deaths reported every year despite a government safety campaign.

The country also suffers hundreds of deaths a year from the mishandling of explosives used for mining, construction and fireworks manufacturing.
Work safety authorities in Shanxi, one of China's biggest coal-mining regions, will begin to limit the number of miners working underground at one time in an effort to prevent overproduction and accidents, Xinhua said in a separate report.
Under the new guidelines, the maximum number of workers for mines with an annual coal production capacity of less than 90,000 tons is 29, Xinhua said, while the number for those producing up to 900,000 tons is 99.

"The high demand for energy and therefore the high price of coal in the country have pushed for over-production in many collieries, quite often at the cost of the great loss of miners' lives," the report said.

The province will also eventually limit the number of mines to about 3,000 and will no longer approve new mines producing less than 300,000 tons of coal a year, Xinhua said.