As a crowd milled around with downcast eyes outside a coal mine in western Turkey on Wednesday, a miner dashed their hopes that his co-workers still stuck inside would make it out alive.
There are 200 of them trapped in the shaft about two-thirds of a mile — or 1 kilometer — underground, disaster officials have said.
He and some friends had crawled out of the burning mine in the town of Soma on their own, he told a reporter from CNN’s sister network CNN Turk.
He choked up as he said that he can’t imagine anyone else having the same luck.
The fire that killed at least 205 workers after a transformer blew up, was still burning and preventing help from getting to them, Turkey’s energy minister said.
“Rescue operations will continue once smoke and CO2 levels are minimized,” Taner Yildiz told reporters.
