In northern Mexico’s Sinaloa state, rescue teams reached a miner who had been trapped for nearly two weeks after a March 25 collapse left the El Rosario mine flooded, authorities said Wednesday. The survivor was brought to the surface in the morning hours and then taken to a hospital in Mazatlán for specialist care, after teams said they had been unable to get to him because of heavily flooded areas.
Authorities said the flooding stemmed from a dam breach tied to a structural failure. They said that when the accident occurred, 25 miners were inside the mine and 21 escaped immediately, while Francisco Zapata Nájera and three co-workers remained trapped.
The rescue effort took days to progress as water blocked access to the underground area where the surviving miner was believed to be. The survivor was located on Tuesday by divers, but rescue teams were not able to reach him through the flooded sections until about 21 hours later, officials said.
Late in the process, the timing of when rescuers could extract the remaining survivor depended on water removal. Earlier, President Claudia Sheinbaum said rescue teams were waiting for the water to be pumped out to complete the extraction, according to the account of the rescue operation provided by authorities.
After the survivor was finally pulled from the mine Wednesday, officials said his condition was stabilized. They added that he was sent to a hospital in Mazatlán by Mexican Air Force helicopter, where he was expected to be treated by specialists.
Sheinbaum also said hours earlier that the operation had produced additional grim updates beyond the survivor’s location. She confirmed that another miner had been found dead and that one more miner remained missing following the March 25 collapse and flooding.
The El Rosario incident comes amid a history of deadly mining accidents in Mexico. In August 2022, 10 miners died when the El Pinabete coal mine in Coahuila flooded, a disaster that sparked controversy over how many workers labored without essential safety protections or official supervision, and authorities later were unable to recover miners’ bodies. Mexico’s deadliest mining accident also occurred in Coahuila in February 2006, when an explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine killed 65 workers.
The Wednesday rescue of Zapata Nájera adds another chapter to a long-running pattern in which mining disasters in Mexico are often followed by prolonged, difficult efforts to access trapped workers when flooding and mine instability prevent rapid extraction.