No contact has been established with the missing, which have not been localized. The rescue operations had to stop because of a risk of explosion.
Le Monde with AFP
A new catastrophe in the Russian mines. At least 11 people were killed and 46 are missing as a result of an accident in a coal mine in Siberia, Thursday, November 25. The causes were not known in the immediate future.
The authorities said they received an alert around 8:35 am local time (0 h 35, Paris time) on the presence of smoke in the Listviajnaia mine, which is in the city of Gramotein, in the region Siberian Kemerovo, where many coal mines are located. According to the local governor’s press service, Sergei Tsivilev, 285 people were in the mine at the time of the accident.
The missing were not localized
“No contact” has been established with missing minors, added the same source. Their location “is not known at the moment,” said the local departmental manager, Alexey Choulguine, cited by the TASS news agency.
“Listviajnaia mine rescue operations are underway. A total of 237 people have been brought back to the surface,” said the Ministry of Russian emergencies on Telegram. Forty-three people were hospitalized, including four in a serious state.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, expressed his “deep condolences to the families of the deceased minors,” said his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, adding to hope that “persons underground can be rescued”.
An accident in the Listviajnaia mine had already taken place in October 2004 when an explosion of methane had killed 13 people. According to the Russian media, an explosion also killed five people in 1981, in the Soviet era.
Risk of explosion
According to a communiqué of the local authorities, 19 specialized rescue teams of the department are on site and attempt to reach the most remote gallery of the mine, where people missing for the appeal could be. The rescue operations, however, had to stop because of a risk of explosion.
The Local Investigation Committee clarified that an investigation for “violation of safety standards” had been launched. The mine belongs to SDS-Ugol, one of the largest coal producers in Russia.
Accidents in the Russian mines, as elsewhere in the ex-USSR, are often linked to laxity in the application of safety standards, mismanagement, or dilapidated equipment going back to the Soviet era.
The most murderer accident in recent years had made 91 deaths and more than a hundred wounded in May 2010 in the Raspadskaya mine, also in the Kemerovo area.
More recently, in October 2019, the rupture of an illegal dam in a gold mine in Siberia had died. The same month, three people had been killed after an accident in a Norilsk Nickel group, the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer in the Arctic. In August 2017, eight workers had disappeared as a result of the flooding of a diamond mine operated by the Russian group Alrosa in Siberia. The world’s leading producer of diamonds, Alrosa had announced the abandonment of research after three weeks of relief operations.