All hope of finding alive 141 workers trapped inside a northern Chinese coal mine vanished today as officials and angry relatives blamed China's worst pit disaster for more than a decade on management's relentless drive for profit.

Although the main ventilation system at the Chenjiashan Coal Mine has been repaired, the chances of anyone surviving Sunday’s gas explosion was virtually nil, a local Communist Party secretary said. Twenty five miners have already been confirmed as dead.

"They have no chance of surviving at all, not even a one percent chance," Yan Mangxue, communist party secretary for Yaoyu village, where 14 of the trapped miners are from, told the AFP news agency.

"Imagine a gas poisoning inside your home, you would die in no more than half an hour. Inside a mine, with no air ventilation, it’s much faster. In five minutes you would lose your life," he said.

A total of 293 miners were underground at the mine in Tongchuan city, Shaanxi province, when the accident happened. About 127 miners escaped, of whom at least 15 were in serious condition. "Many of them suffered serious burns including to their face and several parts of their body," said one miner who excaped.

Families and colleagues of the trapped miners were mentally preparing for the worst. But many of them directed their anger at the mine’s management after it was revealed that a fire broke out at the same pit, and high gas density was detected about a week ago. Despite miners’ concerns, they were ordered to continue working or face fines.

Mr Yan said that the cause of the blast could be directly attributed to negligence and greed.

He said a blaze broke out in the mine on November 19. Although it was put out a few days later, on November 23, the gas density in the shafts still exceeded the limit considered safe.

"Under those conditions, the management should have immediately discontinued production, but they didn’t, which directly resulted in the explosion on Sunday," he said.

"If they had stopped production and ventilated the shaft to reduce the gas density, the explosion on Sunday wouldn’t have happened."

Mr Yan said that the mine bosses were more concerned with increasing profits and keeping production levels high to satisfy China’s roaring demand for coal. He indicated that arrests were imminent.

Tang Longqing, a miner, agreed. "They often force miners to work even when the gas density is unsafe," he said. The state-owned mine is directly under the supervision of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety.

The blast came barely a month after 148 workers were killed in a gas explosion at the Daping mine in Henan province.

More than 7,000 workers are killed each year in China’s coal mines, considered the world’s most dangerous, according to official figures. The Hong Kong-based human rights group China Labor Bulletin puts the annual number of deaths in the industry at around 20,000.

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