Canadian miners trapped in elevator

The Vanscoy Agrium Potash mine (Photo: Archives).

Four employees at Agrium’s Vanscoy potash mine, located 30 kilometres southwest of Saskatoon, were trapped in an industrial elevator for six hours on Wednesday evening.

According to CTV, the workers were coming up the mine shaft in the lift at about 10:30 p.m., when an object fell down the shaft. The incident activated a safety device and caused the elevator to come to a stop.

In order to get it moving again, operators had to bring in a winch system that raised the stuck elevator up the shaft, the CBC reports.

This is not the first accident at the Saskatchewan site. In 2014, 54 workers had to spend the night in emergency shelters after a fire broke out underground. In August this year, a worker was killed after being trapped by two pieces of heavy machinery and another worker was seriously hurt underground.

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