Swaying lamp lights miraculously led members of a rescue team to 115 workers, who had been trapped in a flooded coal mine in Shanxi Province for nine days.

A worker is sent to the hospital after being rescued early on Monday morning. [Xinhua]

Hao Xiqing, a member of the rescue team, was the first to spot the light.

His team descended the shaft of the mine at 4:00 PM on Sunday with the objective of monitoring gas and observing the water level in the flooded cavern.

At 10:27 PM, when Hao was sitting on a pipe used to pump water from the tunnel, he raised his head and suddenly noticed the reflection of a light swaying on a water surface some distance away.

"Isn't that the location that the command headquarters said may have survivors?" he asked himself.

He immediately ran to a phone 50 meters away and dialed the number 8000 to report the development to headquarters.

A few minutes later, 10 teams comprised of more than 100 rescue workers were sent down to the spot.

By Monday afternoon, 115 miners on stretchers had been carried out in succession.

With their heads swathed in a thick quilt, each survivor was borne by four or five rescue workers to a waiting ambulance and rushed to nearby hospitals for medical check-ups and treatment.

Liu Qiang, head of the medical treatment team at the rescue site, said 153 beds had been prepared at five hospitals, while 153 ambulances had been placed on standby at the mine in anticipation of the miners surviving their plight.

The arrangement was to make sure every survivor could receive timely treatment, Liu said.

Once they are lifted out of the mine, they will each be transported to a nearby hospital, where a medical team is waiting for them, he said.

To assist with their treatment, medical experts, including psychological consultants, have been sent to the Wangjialing Coal Mine by the Ministry of Health and from the provincial capital of Taiyuan.

The survivors will be monitored around the clock and undergo 12 standard tests to assess their conditions, Liu said. All of them will initially wear eye masks to prevent their vision from being damaged after being confined to darkness for more than nine days and then placed in the care of ophthalmologists.