Savastepe: Miner Erdal Bicak believes he knows why so many of his colleagues died in Turkey`s worst mining disaster: company negligence. And he knows one other thing, he`s never going back down any mine again.
Bicak, 24, had just ended his shift Tuesday and was making his way to the surface when managers ordered him back underground because of a problem in the Soma coal mine in western Turkey.
"The company is guilty," Bicak told The Associated Press, adding that managers had machines that measure methane gas levels. "The new gas levels had gotten too high and they didn`t tell us in time."
The miner also said government safety inspectors never visited the lower reaches of the Soma mine and have no idea of how bad conditions get as workers trudge deeper into the ground.
Bicak, whose leg was badly injured and in a cast, recounted his miraculous escape late yesterday while at a candle-lit vigil for Soma victims in the town square of nearby Savastepe.
Public anger has surged in the wake of the Soma coal mine inferno that killed at least 299 miners. Police used tear gas and water cannon yesterday to disperse rock-throwing protesters in Soma who were demanding that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan`s government resign.
In Istanbul, police broke up a crowd who lit candles to Honor the Soma victims.
Bicak said he ended up about a kilometre (.6 miles) underground with 150 people Tuesday afternoon when he heard an explosion. He said they were given old oxygen masks that he thought hadn`t been checked in many years.
Bicak and a close friend tried to make it to an exit, but there was a lot of smoke. The path was very narrow and steep, with ceilings so low that miners can`t stand up, making it difficult to leave quickly. He and his friend took turns slapping each other to stay conscious.
"I told my friend `I can`t go on. Leave me here. I`m going to die,`" Bicak said. But his friend said to him, "`No, we`re getting out of here.`"
Bicak eventually made it out of the mine with his friend, by then lapsing in and out of consciousness. He said he lost many friends and out of the 150 miners he was working with, only 15 made it out alive.
Thick smoke from the underground fire killed many miners who had no gas masks, according to Akin Celik, the Soma mining company`s operations manager.
Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said today that crews had found one more body overnight, raising the death toll to 299, but a new fire was hampering search efforts for the two or three workers still missing. He said 485 miners escaped or were rescued.
