(Gramoteïno) At least 11 people were killed and nearly 50 were missing Thursday after an accident in a coal mine in Siberia, a new disaster that hits a regularly bereaved sector in Russia.
After operations carried out all morning to find the miners stranded underground, the emergency services announced in the afternoon that they had to “temporarily suspend” their work because of a risk of explosion.
Authorities said they received an alert at around 8:35 a.m. local time (8:35 p.m. EST) about the presence of smoke in the Listviajnaya mine in the town of Gramoteïno, in the Siberian region of Kemerovo, where many coal mines are located. .
According to the press service of local governor Sergei Tsivilev, 285 people were in the mine at the time of the accident, the causes of which were not immediately known.
At least 11 people died and 46 were trapped inside the mine, the same source said, adding that there was “no contact” with the missing miners. A previous report reported 49 people still inside.
“A total of 237 people were brought to the surface,” the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, in particular in charge of firefighters and rescuers, told Telegram.
Forty-three people were hospitalized, four of them in serious condition, according to local authorities.
The location of the missing “is not known at present,” said a ministry official, Alexeï Choulguine, quoted by the TASS agency.
Russian President Vladimir Poutine expressed his “deep condolences to the families of the deceased miners,” said his spokesman Dmitri Peskov, adding that he hoped that “people underground can be rescued”.
An accident in the Listviajnaya mine had already taken place in October 2004, when a methane explosion killed 13 people. According to Russian media, an explosion also killed five people there in 1981, during Soviet times.
Widespread laxity
According to a statement from local authorities, 19 specialized rescue teams from the ministry are on site and were trying, until the suspension of operations, to reach the most remote gallery of the mine, where the missing people could be found.
The local investigation committee specified for its part that an investigation for “violation of safety standards” had been launched.
The mine is owned by SDS-Ugol, one of Russia’s largest coal producers.
Accidents in mines in Russia, as elsewhere in the former USSR, are often linked to laxity in the application of safety standards, poor management or dilapidated equipment dating back to Soviet times.
The deadliest accident in recent years left 91 dead and more than 100 injured in May 2010 in the Raspadskaya mine, also in the Kemerovo region.
More recently, in October 2019, the rupture of an illegal dam at a gold mine in Siberia left 17 people dead. In the same month, three people were killed after an accident in a mine of the Norilsk Nickel group, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium, in the Arctic.
In August 2017, eight workers were missing after a flood in a diamond mine operated by the Russian group Alrosa in Siberia. The world’s leading producer of diamonds, Alrosa had announced the abandonment of the search after three weeks of relief operations.
Beyond the human toll, sometimes heavy, certain accidents draw attention to the practices of the Russian mining industry, in which exploitation is often carried out to the detriment of the environment.