(Updates status of food delivery, paragraph 2; adds separate incident, paragraphs 9-10) BEIJING, July 30 (Reuters) - Sixty-nine Chinese miners spent a second day trapped in a flooded coal pit, but they were safe and in contact with rescuers late on Monday, state media said. Rescuers were trying to deliver food and water to the miners through the 800-metre (2,600-ft) ventilation pipes they had installed, the official Xinhua news agency said. "All 69 miners are safe, and their mood is stable," the China News Service cited a statement by the government's work safety administration as saying. Xinhua said that rescue workers were still working to remove mud and sediment from a passage that would allow them to pump more water out of the mine. Xinhua cited unnamed officials as saying that rescuers had managed to clear nearly 40 metres of the passage and had another 10 metres to go, meaning they expected to be able to resume pumping water by Tuesday morning. Earlier reports said water had been pumped out and holes drilled to provide oxygen for the miners, who were swamped after a flash flood caused by heavy rain raced through an old shaft at the mine about 200 km (125 miles) west of Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan. Thirty-three people had managed to escape the state-owned mine, operated by Zhijian Mining Co. Ltd., Xinhua said. Xu Guangchun, Henan's provincial Communist Party boss, who rushed to the scene with Li Yizhong, head of China's top work safety watchdog, was able to talk to some trapped workers by telephone on Sunday night, Xinhua said. Separately, Xinhua said that at least nine people were killed in a coal mine accident in Linfen city in northern Shanxi province on July 5, but that the mine's management had concealed the accident for nearly a month. A team had been set up to investigate, it said. China's coal industry is the world's deadliest, killing an average of 13 people a day last year. Most of the deaths occur in small private unregulated mines, but large state-run collieries report much higher death tolls when accidents hit. The Zhijian mine, which was founded in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, had a designed annual production capacity of 210,000 tonnes, but actually produced 300,000 tonnes each year, Xinhua said.
