BEIJING – Sixteen people were killed in a coal mine fire on Sunday in south-west China’s Guizhou province.

This is according to a filing by the mine’s owner, Guizhou Panjiang Refined Coal Co, with the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Monday.

The Panzhou City government said in a notice posted on its website on Sunday night that the fire broke out at the Shanjiaoshu Coal Mine at around 8.10am local time,

“It was preliminarily determined that the conveyor belt caught fire, causing 16 people to be trapped,” it added, with no further details on what was damaged or how the fire began.

State media outlet Xinhua reported on Monday that rescue operations at the mine are under way, and a team has been dispatched to Guizhou province to guide the efforts.

According to Shanghai-based commodities consultancy Mysteel, all mines in Panzhou city have suspended production for a day,

Guizhou’s mine safety administration told Reuters it did not have information on the situation.

The area has a total production capacity of about 52.5 million tonnes per year of mostly coking coal.

It represents about 5 per cent of China’s coking coal production capacity, according to Mysteel.

The state-owned company, also called Guizhou Panjiang, has ordered safety inspections at all of its mines and has taken measures to ensure safe production, the exchange filing added.

The company operates seven coal mines with a total capacity of about 17.3 million tonnes.

The mine where the incident took place has an annual capacity of 3.1 million tonnes, according to Mysteel.

The Panzhou City mine is about 3,600km south-west of the capital Beijing.

China – the world’s biggest emitter of the pollutants driving climate change – operates thousands of coal mines, even as Beijing has pledged to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

While safety standards in the country’s mining sector have improved in recent decades, accidents still frequently plague the industry, often due to lax enforcement of protocols, especially at the most rudimentary sites.

In 2022, 245 people died in 168 accidents, according to official figures.

An explosion at a coal mine in Shaanxi province in northern China killed 11 people in August, nine of whom were trapped inside.

Another two people managed to make it to the surface before they succumbed to their injuries, according to state media reports at the time.

In February, a coal mine partly collapsed in the remote and sparsely populated Alxa League of the northern Inner Mongolia region after a 180m-high slope gave way.

Dozens of people and vehicles were buried under a mountain of debris, but the authorities did not disclose the final death toll for months.

It was revealed only in June that 53 people had been killed.

In a sign of that incident’s severity, Chinese President Xi Jinping at the time ordered the authorities to “do everything possible to search for and rescue the missing people… and protect the security of people’s lives and property as well as overall social stability”.

The authorities deployed hundreds of personnel and more than 100 pieces of equipment as part of the rescue operation, according to local government statements.

And in Dec 2022, around 40 people were working underground when a gold mine in the north-western Xinjiang region collapsed. AFP, REUTERS