The explosion at 2 p.m. on January 10 severely damaged cages, ladders, and communication systems within the mine shafts, trapping twenty-two miners working at 648 meters and below. What happened next compounded the disaster. The mine's operating company, judging the rescue too difficult, did not report the situation to the Qixia Municipal Emergency Management Bureau until 8:05 p.m. the following day -- more than thirty hours after the explosion. The Qixia municipal committee reported upward within the hour, triggering a response that eventually reached the highest levels of government. The delay cost time that miners underground did not have. When the scope of the cover-up became clear, both the Qixia City Party Secretary and the Deputy Secretary and Mayor were removed from their posts for neglect of responsibility.

The rescue mobilized 11 teams, 393 workers, and 70 pieces of mining and drilling equipment. The challenge was brutal: solid rock, active utility lines, and a mine deep enough that conventional access routes were completely blocked. Rescuers worked on multiple boreholes simultaneously, each designed to serve a different purpose -- ventilation, communication, life-supply delivery, and eventually extraction. The third borehole, drilled in the afternoon of January 17, became the primary lifeline. Supplies lowered on weighted ropes reached survivors, and the note that came back confirmed that at least some of the twenty-two were alive. National medical experts from Beijing's leading hospitals were dispatched to the site to strengthen the rescue force, and teams from around the province converged on the rural Shandong hillside.

By January 24, two weeks after the explosion, eleven miners had been brought to the surface one at a time in a cuffa -- a large metallic bucket used in mine shafts to transport personnel and equipment. Each extraction was painstaking, threading a human being through a narrow shaft hundreds of meters of rock. The following day, the news turned grim. Nine miners were found dead, killed by the blast from a second explosion that had occurred underground. A tenth body was discovered later. One miner remains missing. The survivors emerged into daylight blinking and weakened but alive, having endured fourteen days in darkness sustained by supplies lowered through a borehole barely wider than a dinner plate. The investigation that followed held the mine company accountable for both the explosion and the catastrophic delay in reporting it.