After recent flooding halted production at state-owned Coal India Ltd.'s Dipka mine in India's Chhattisgarh province, the company expects to resume daily output of about 30,000 tonnes at the operation within 10 days, Reuters reported Oct. 3.
"We will start pumping out water from the lower benches where water has become quite voluminous and that will take at least a month," Binay Dayal, the company's technical director, was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, return to full annual production of 30 million tonnes, or more than 82,000 tonnes per day, may take even longer.
A senior official of the company's South Eastern Coalfields Ltd. unit commented that the efforts to pump out water from the mine were being conducted on a "war footing," though water inflows into the mine had significantly reduced.
Dayal added that the company will still try to achieve its annual production target of 660 Mt during the year ending March 2020, by ramping up production at other mines.
