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PRINCETON, Indiana - Three construction workers fell to their deaths on Friday as they were lowered into a coal mine air shaft, authorities said, in the second serious accident at a US mine in less than a week.
"As they were lowering them, the bucket caught on something - maybe on the wall of the shaft - and it tipped and they fell," Princeton Mayor Bob Hurst said in a telephone interview.
The air shaft, which was under construction, was about 600 feet deep, and was two-thirds of the way to its intended 900 foot depth, where the coal seam is located, said Hurst, a retired geologist for coal mining companies.
The workers were employed by Frontier-Kemper Constructors Inc., which was digging the vertical air shaft for the Gibson County Coal Company mine. The shaft, which had not been connected to the mine, widens out from its 8-foot-(2.4-meter-) wide mouth.
A mine rescue team was sent to retrieve the bodies in steamy 100-degree (38C) heat near Princeton, a town of 8,000 in the far southwest corner of the state.
Unlike the Indiana accident, a mine collapse in Utah on Monday trapped six coal miners underground. It is not known whether those miners are alive or dead.
The Indiana mine - owned by Alliance Resource Partners LLP, the fourth-largest coal producer in the eastern United States - was opened in 2000 and has a capacity of 700 tons an hour.
In 2000, during the mine's construction, two workers were injured when an explosive charge detonated accidentally.
- REUTERS
