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Mine explosion kills 74 in China

REUTERS, Tangshan, China
A gas explosion at a Chinese coal pit has killed at least 74 miners, state media said yesterday, notching up another statistic in a grimly predictable series marking the world's deadliest mining industry.
Hours after Xinhua News Agency broke the news of the deaths in northern Hebei province, it said seven miners had been trapped in a flood at a mine in Jilin province in the northeast. One has since been rescued.
Thirty-two miners were still missing in freezing temperatures at the Liuguantun colliery in Tangshan, 180 km (110 miles) east of Beijing in Hebei, after Wednesday's blast.
Xinhua said initially that 186 miners had been working in the pit at
the time but later revised the figure to 106. The State Administration of Work Safety put the number in the pit at 123.
China has been struggling to clean up its mining industry, which killed 2,700 people in the first half of 2005 alone, but a string of accidents in recent weeks has made a mockery of safety campaigns.
"Hebei province on Thursday decided to tighten measures on production safety in the wake of a deadly coal mine blast," Xinhua said.
Police struggled to hold back hundreds of relatives crowding around the mine's entrance hoping for information. But with high gas levels inside the shaft, rescue efforts were going slowly.
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"This is the first accident at a mine around here. I'd heard that it had a problem with the ventilation which trapped gases underground and caused the explosion," said He Wenping, who works at a nearby colliery and has been a miner for 32 years.
Local people said most of the miners were from poorer,inland parts of China.
Families of the dead would each be compensated 200,000 yuan (14,000 pounds), state television said.
An explosion in the northeastern province of Heilongjianginlate November killed 171 miners.
Flooding at another Hebei mine days earlier trapped 18 underground. Three managers fled the scene, leaving rescuers with no guide to the underground warren.