(Gramoteïno) Fifty-two people, 46 miners and six rescuers, were killed Thursday after an accident in a coal mine in Siberia, a new disaster that strikes a regularly bereaved sector in Russia.
If the initial toll of this accident which occurred early in the morning showed 14 dead, it was greatly increased at nightfall.
“According to preliminary information, no one survived in the mine. 52 people died, ”reported the official TASS agency, citing a source within the emergency services.
The accident claimed the lives of 46 miners trapped underground and six rescuers, according to this source, also cited by the RIA Novosti and Interfax agencies.
Forty minors were also hospitalized.
Authorities said they received an alert at around 8:35 a.m. local time (8:35 p.m. EST) on Thursday about the presence of smoke in the Listviajnaya mine in 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.
The majority were rescued by rescuers, but 46 others remained stranded underground.
By midday, contact was also lost with one of the rescue teams which included six rescuers. Search operations were finally suspended due to a risk of explosion.
“Violation of safety standards”
The local investigation committee opened an investigation for “violation of safety standards” and announced in the evening the arrest of the mine manager, his deputy, as well as the person in charge of the area where the accident took place. place.
It was established that these officials “allowed a violation of industrial safety rules at dangerous sites” which caused “a gas-dynamic phenomenon” in the mine, the committee said in a statement.
“It is a great tragedy”, for his part declared President Vladimir Putin on television.
The families and relatives of the miners, gathered in front of the entrance to the territory of the mine, did not wish to speak, according to an AFP correspondent on the spot.
Three days of mourning have been decreed in the region from Friday.
“High risk of explosion”
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.
According to local authorities, 19 specialized rescue teams were dispatched to the scene. 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.
In May 2010, an accident left 91 dead and more than a hundred injured in the Raspadskaya mine, also in the Kemerovo region.
More recently, in October 2019, the rupture of a dam in a gold mine in Siberia left 17 people dead.
The same month, three people were killed in an accident at a mine of the Norilsk Nickel group, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium, in the Arctic.
Beyond the human toll, sometimes heavy, certain accidents draw attention to the practices of the Russian mining industry, often to the detriment of the environment.