At least 90 people were killed and hundreds more injured during a gas explosion at a coal mine in China’s northern province of Shanxi, state-controlled media said on May 23.

The blast happened on the evening of May 22 at the Liushenyu coal mine in Qinyuan County while about 247 workers were working underground, according to state-controlled media.

Local authorities initially reported eight fatalities and 38 workers still trapped underground, while 201 workers had been brought to safety. Officials now say the death toll has jumped to 90, and more than 120 people were injured.

It’s the country’s worst mine disaster in more than 16 years.

Rescue operations are underway, and the cause of the explosion remains under investigation. Shanxi is China’s coal-mining heartland.

State-controlled media said that a person in charge of the mining company had been taken into custody.

The mine is operated by ⁠Shanxi Tongzhou Group Liushenyu Coal Industry, which was established in 2010 ​and is controlled by Shanxi Tongzhou Coal Coking Group, according to ​corporate database Qichacha.

It was placed on a national list of disaster-prone coal mines by China’s National Mine Safety Administration in 2024 for having “high gas content.”

The Epoch Times could not independently verify the casualty figures. The actual number of casualties resulting from the blast could be higher than reported, given past allegations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime routinely suppresses information related to major incidents.

Shanxi Province is known as China’s main coal mining province. It is larger than Greece and has a population of about 34 million, and the province’s hundreds of thousands of miners dug 1.3 billion tons of coal last year, almost a third of China’s total.

In October 2021, Beijing’s Mine Safety Supervision Bureau found that coal mines in Shanxi faced a number of serious safety issues, including inadequate safety protocols for emergency situations such as gas leaks and a lack of supervision of workers.

Li Yuanhua, a former associate professor of education at Capital Normal University in Beijing, told The Epoch Times in October 2021 that although the CCP has put safety rules in place, they are often not enforced.

Li also alleged that unsafe mines were still able to get permission to restart operations because local governments pursue tax revenues, and there is collusion between the government and business entities.

In February 2023, 53 people were killed after a collapse at an open-pit mine in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region. In November 2009, an explosion at a mine in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province killed 108, according to state media.

Kathleen Li, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.