OSINNIKI (Russia) - A gas explosion at
a Siberian colliery on Saturday killed up to 40 miners,
officials said. Rescue teams
pushed their way down two routes into a vast shaft to
try to find about 20 others missing underground. The
explosion ripped through the mine early on Saturday as
54 miners who had worked through the night were nearing
the end of their shift.
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Natalya
Katunina cries in the village of Vysokiy, in the
Kemerovo region of western Siberia on Tuesday,
April 13, 2004 during the funeral of her husbend
Alexander, who died after a methane blast at the
Taizhina coal mine. The death toll has reached 45
following Saturday's explosion.
(AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev) |
With the rescue teams working
non-stop, Itar-Tass news agency said 30 miners had been
found dead in Siberia's Kemerovo district in the heart
of the Kuzbass coalfield where accidents are a regular
occurrence.
The blast left a pile of rubble that blocked rescuers,
forcing some of them to resort to a longer route to the
epicenter through a neighboring mine, while the others
tried to dig through the blasted shaft.
Eight miners were rescued from the Taizhina mine on
Saturday, said Mr Valery Korchagin, an emergency
department spokesman in the Kemerovo region of western
Siberia.
Four of the rescued miners were injured and two of them
were hospitalized with burns, he added.
Only 16 of the bodies had been retrieved by yesterday
morning. The bodies were badly disfigured, making
identification very difficult. A handful of rescuers,
their faces grim and blackened by coal dust, emerged
from the adjacent mine.
They said they had been working with shovels and just
their hands to clear the rubble. Asked if there was hope
of finding anyone alive, one of the men just shook his
head solemnly.
As the nation celebrated Easter, the most important
holiday for Russia's predominant Orthodox Christian
faith, the trapped miners' fearful relatives gathered in
the mine's administration building to await news.
Russian state television showed brief pictures of a
sobbing woman rushing away after apparently learning of
a relative's death in the mine.
Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev, who was overseeing the
rescue operation, said on Russian television that the
shortest path to the blast site was blocked by what
appeared to be impassable rubble.
Itar-Tass said the roundabout path that rescuers were
trying to use was 5km long.
The blast in the mine occurred at a depth of 560m, and
was believed to have been caused by a methane build-up,
a duty officer at the Kemerovo regional emergency
department said.
The shaft was filled with carbon dioxide, the Interfax
news agency reported.
Accidents are common in the Russian coal industry and
miners stage frequent protests over wage delays and
declining safety standards.
In September 2002, one miner at Taizhina was killed and
two others were seriously injured when the roof of a
ventilation shaft collapsed during reconstruction work,
showering them with rocks.
According to Itar-Tass, the mine in the city of Osinniki
was built in 1998 on the foundation of a closed mine,
and the equipment appeared to be run-down. A methane
explosion killed five miners in the Kemerovo region in
January, and an investigation indicated that a methane
blast - possibly sparked by a short circuit - caused a
ceiling collapse that killed 12 workers at another mine
in the region last June.
In October last year, icy water flooded a mine in
southern Russia, killing two men. Rescuers freed 69
others. |