At least 200 coal miners in western Turkey were killed on Tuesday after an apparent electrical explosion caused a fire in the mine. More than 360 of the 787 people in the mine were evacuated, but the remaining 200-plus miners are trapped. The rescue effort is ongoing, but it's "reaching a critical stage," Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said early Wednesday. The mine is outside of the town of Soma, about 155 miles south of Istanbul. The numbers are still fluid, complicated by the explosion hitting during a shift change.
Turkey's worst mining disaster on record was in 1992, when a gas explosion killed 263 workers near Zonguldak, on the Black Sea coast east of Istanbul.
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