SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A collapse at a copper mine in Chile killed one worker and left five trapped underground, authorities said Friday, forcing Chile’s state mining company to suspend operations in affected areas of the world’s largest underground copper deposit.
An official confirmed Sunday that the bodies of all five miners trapped in a collapsed shaft for three days were found and identified.
Nine other mine workers suffered injuries, said Chile’s National Copper Corp., known as Codelco, describing the incident as the result of “a seismic event.”
Codelco identified the first deceased as Paulo Marín Tapia and said he had been working on the Andesita project, a new 25-kilometer (15-mile) tunnel complex extending from the El Teniente mine on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains. That expanded section had only recently started to produce copper.
Aquiles Cubillos, the lead prosecutor in Chile’s O’Higgins region, said the body of Moises Pavez, the last miner to remain missing, was found at 3:30 p.m. local time by rescue teams. They had drilled through dozens of meters (feet) of rock to reach the stranded workers.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported a magnitude 5 earthquake in an area of central Chile where Codelco’s flagship El Teniente mine is located, at 5:34 p.m. local time on Thursday. Codelco reported the tremor had a magnitude of 4.2.
As the mountain shook, mounds of rocks and dirt caved in, falling into the tunnel where the five miners were working and blocking all access routes to the sites 900 meters underground.
The company said that search-and-rescue teams had determined the exact location of the partial collapse but could not communicate with the five trapped workers.
Authorities said they’re still investigating whether it was a naturally occurring earthquake or whether mining activity at Codelco’s El Teniente mine caused the quake. Chilean prosecutors also launched a criminal investigation to determine whether any safety standards were violated.
Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, said that the tremor struck the Machalí commune in the O’Higgins region, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the capital, Santiago.
Codelco halted operations at the affected section of the copper mine and evacuated 3,000 people from the wider site to safe areas.
The company canceled a presentation of its first-half financial results, set for Friday morning, due to the rescue efforts.
Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, also lies in the seismically active “Ring of Fire” that surrounds the shores of the Pacific Ocean.