Six students drown after falling into slurry-filled tank on field trip

The accident occurred at an ore processing plant in northern China.

Six university students drowned on Wednesday after they fell into a tank while on a field trip to an ore processing plant in northern China, Chinese state media reported.

The students, who were majoring in mineral processing engineering at Northeastern University in Shenyang, were on a field trip to Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, when the grid plate they were standing on collapsed as they were observing a flotation cell, according to state media.

Flotation is a stage in the mining process used to concentrate the minerals. Finely ground minerals are mixed with water in a container called a flotation cell to produce a “metallurgical pulp” that helps sort the valuable from the unneeded materials.

The students fell into the flotation cell, which looks like a large container, about 10.20am.

Rescuers scrambled to retrieve them, but the students were pronounced dead. A teacher was also injured in the incident.

China National Gold Group, the company operating the plant, said in a statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange that “all-out rescue efforts” were used to try to save them and that it “extends profound mourning for those who unfortunately perished in the incident”. Northeastern University declined to comment.

An engineering student from the university who had previously been to the same plant told the Southern Metropolis Daily that the tanks are about 10m tall and are filled with thick slurry, making it unlikely they would have been able to move.

The student, who was not named in the report, identified those who died as junior-year undergraduates and said that their field trip was part of an internship organised by the university.

In a now-deleted company blog post in February, China Gold said it had recently replaced grid plates and “eradicated safety hazards” at the plant.

The death of the six university students was trending on the Weibo microblog Thursday morning, with the hashtag #ChinaGoldApology garnering roughly 52 million views within a two-hour time span.

“If daily safety checks had been done thoroughly, how would they drown during a visit?” one Weibo user commented. “Who will answer for the trauma felt by the six families? And who will bear the pain of the six kids dying?”

Inner Mongolia is no stranger to tragedies in the mining industry. An open-pit coal mine caved in 2023, killing 53 people and injuring six. China’s national broadcaster showed footage of massive plumes of soil and dust rising into the air during the collapse, and said that a subsequent landslide had hampered rescue efforts.

Authorities in China later pinned the incident on “a long-term existence of major hidden risks”, including poor construction and irresponsible management of mining activities, according to Chinese nationalist newspaper Global Times. Several company workers were arrested and dozens of civil servants were placed under investigation or faced penalties, it said.