"They have no hope of survival," Shandong province vice governor Huang Sheng told reporters here, even as rescuers continued to pump water out of the two pits that have been submerged since Friday.

Torrential rains led to a river in Shandong bursting its banks, sending water pouring into the mines that sit 10 kilometres (six miles) apart near the city of Xintai.

With frantic rescue efforts being maintained, officials had until Thursday refused to rule out the possibility, however slim, of a miracle survival story.

Huang's comments confirmed that the Xintai flooding was one of the worst disasters to hit China's infamously dangerous coal mining industry.

In the biggest reported tragedy in recent years, an explosion at a coal mine in China's northeastern Liaoning province in 2005 claimed 214 lives.

Relatives of some of the victims of the Xintai disaster told AFP they had not been officially informed that the miners were definitely dead, but that they were not surprised.

"We were expecting the news... it's no good getting angry. You just have to accept the fact that he has died," the brother of one of the miners, surnamed Zhang, told AFP by telephone from Xintai.

"Whatever you do now, you cannot revive them. You can cry, you can go and make a scene, but you can't make them come back alive."

Over 750 miners were underground when water swept into the Zhangzhuang mine at Xintai. Although many managed to escape, 172 were trapped. Nine other workers were trapped at the nearby Minggong coal mine.

At the Zhangzhuang mine, officials said water almost completely filled the 860-metre (2,840-foot) pit on Friday.

About 24 hours after the flooding, water was still as high as 20 metres below the surface, leaving the trapped miners with only the slimmest hopes of having found an air pocket.

The twin accidents have caused anger in China not just for the sheer number of people killed, but because it has highlighted atrocious work safety practices in the nation's coal mining industry.

Relatives of the missing workers clashed repeatedly with security guards and police at the mine sites early this week, saying that bad management was responsible for the tragedy.

Zhang told AFP on Wednesday that it was well known mine bosses ignored warning signals about the incoming water.

"They were told before it happened. Other mines in the area shut down in time and they were fine," he said.

Some of China's state-run media had also put the blame on mine owners and local authorities, saying the tragedy could have been avoided if the top priority had been workers' safety rather than keeping the mine operating.

However Huang, who briefed reporters at a press conference unrelated to the flooding, repeated assertions from authorities that the accidents were a "natural disaster".

"The rainfall near the two mines was definitely beyond our expectations... it was greatly beyond what humans could do to resist the damage," he said.

"Government departments and experts have been to the scene and the conclusion was very obvious (that it was a natural disaster)."

More than 4,700 coal miners died in China last year, an average of nearly 13 a day, according to official figures. But independent labour groups put the real toll at up to 20,000 annually, saying many accidents are covered up.

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