LONDON ? Rescue workers found the body of a third miner in a flooded coal mine in south Wales on Friday, but held out hope that a fourth man would be found alive.
Earlier Friday, police discovered the body of one miner at the bottom of the main mine shaft and the second where he had been working when water flooded the mine on Thursday.
The four miners have been named as Phillip Hill, 45, Charles Bresnan, 62, David Powell, 50, and Garry Jenkins, 39. The dead men have not been identified. The men were trapped underground in the Gleision Colliery near Swansea.
"This is a terrible situation getting worse and it just got worse," said local lawmaker Peter Hain after the second body was found. He said one bright sign was that rescue workers had discovered there is oxygen in the vicinity of the mine.
Hain extended his sympathies to the miners' families ? sentiments echoed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said he was praying for all involved.
Prime Minister David Cameron said "every support will be given to the emergency services," adding that later "in due course we must ensure we fully understand and learn from the causes of this accident."
Cameron is being updated regularly on the situation and has been in touch with local police and Hain, according to a spokeswoman for the prime minister.
Authorities have said three other miners managed to get out of the mine after the accident Thursday morning. One was in the hospital listed as critically ill, while the two others escaped largely unharmed and were aiding in the rescue operation.
Rescue teams are pumping water out of the pit, excavating blockages and shoring up the tunnels. The previous night, divers trying to reach the men were forced to abandon their attempts.
The mine burrowed into a steep and isolated hillside, is one of the few remainders of Britain's once-mighty mining industry.
South Wales was long synonymous with coal mining, as immortalized by Richard Llewellyn's novel "How Green Was My Valley," whose film version won the 1941 U.S. Academy Award as best picture. Cardiff, Wales' main port city, once led the world in coal exports.
However, Britain's Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher shut down the mines following a yearlong showdown in 1984 with the miners' union. In the year of the strike, there were 196,000 miners working in Britain; now there are about 6,000.
"This is a community which has a mining history that goes back generations," Hain said. >There is an inbred support for miners in this kind of predicament and their families.
"Everybody is rallying around but everybody is traumatized because they've not known this horror for a generation or more."
The worst mining accident in British history was in 1913, when 439 miners were killed in a gas explosion at the Senghenydd colliery in South Wales. In a 1966 disaster that shocked the world, an avalanche of coal sludge buried a school in the village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Seven people have been killed in mining accidents in Britain since 2006, according to Health and Safety Executive statistics.
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Cassandra Vinograd in London contributed to this report.
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