Miners Scattered about the Pit Face
// How the Kuzbass Miners Died
Explosion at the Mine
According to information available yesterday (April 11), 42 miners were dead, 4 were hospitalized, and 5 were missing as a result of a methane explosion on April 10 at the Taizhina mine near the city of Osinniki in southern Kemerovo Region. This was one of the worst disasters in the history of the Kuzbass. April 13 has been declared a day of mourning in the region.
An Earth Tremor
The Taizhina mine is owned by OAO Yuzhkuzbassugol Incorporated Company, one of whose owners is Evrazholding of Moscow. The company began operating in August 2001 on the site of the Vysokaya mine, which had been declared unpromising and closed in November 1997 by a decision of the Russian government. Developed proven coal reserves at Taizhina amount to more than 10 million tons. The company has 650 employees, and the mine produces about 700 000 tons of “Zh” grade coking coal per year. The miners earn about 10 000 rubles a month, which is considered excellent pay. The last serious accident at Taizhina was in September 2002, when two people died as a result of a methane blast.
The accident occurred on Saturday at 6:55 in the morning local time at a depth of 550 m. Witnesses say that a couple of seconds before the explosion, all the lights at the mine site went out, apparently due to a short circuit. The explosion was so powerful that residents of Osinniki living 10 km away from the epicenter felt the earth shake. Relatives of the miners who had gone on shift realized that something terrible had happened, and without waiting for the alarm rushed to the mine office.
At the end of the day on Saturday, the emergency headquarters at Taizhina announced that 59 people were presumed to have been in the mine at the time of the explosion. However, yesterday the regional Civil Defense and Emergency Situations department reported that 53 miners had been underground and another 6 miners from that shift had been working on the surface.
According to information from the Ministry for Emergency Situations (MChS), three of the people who were in the mine made it to the surface on their own and rescuers brought out three more. Three of these six miners were hospitalized with fractures and burns, while another had a fractured spine. The other two refused hospitalization and went home.
Thus, 47 people remained underground. Distraught relatives were lodged in the conference room at the Taizhina mine office. Mineral water and tranquilizers were provided for them, and psychologists arrived to help. For a long time was no news, and people quietly cried and whispered to one another. Then information began arriving bit by bit: 2 bodies had been found, then 6, 10, 16, 22…. “All we know is that there won’t be any survivors,” the wife of one of the miners trapped underground told the Kommersant correspondent. She wasn’t crying; only her hands were shaking. Someone was sobbing quietly and someone else was sobbing out loud.
Local rescuers were joined by a group of officers of the Siberian Regional Civil Defense and Emergency Situations Center led by their commander, Lieutenant-General Sergei Salov; they were flown from Krasnoyarsk especially for the search. A total of 365 rescuers worked in shifts at the scene of the disaster. Men exhausted by long hours of searching through the wreckage came to the surface, recovered their strength in the mine cafeteria, and then descended to the face again.
As they fought their way toward the buried miners, they cut a passage through the bore pits of the nearby Osinnikovskaya mine (they brought 12 bodies to the surface through them). As they explained at the emergency headquarters, the search for the miners was complicated by the length and intricacy of the mine workings they had to go through to get to the probable explosion site. The workings were also partially blocked by rubble, which had to be cleared away manually. Fortunately, the methane explosion had not caused a fire; even so, the work was extremely difficult. “You can’t breathe down there,” a soot-covered rescuer wearing a life vest shouted curtly in response to journalists’ confused questions.
The exhausted rescuers shunned attempts at conversation and spoke sullenly and rudely with journalists: “What do want to know?! Yeah, there are arms and legs scattered all over the place down there!” According to available information, bodies were strewn over a distance of 2.5 km in the mine. Rescuers brought the collected remains to the surface at about three o’clock on Saturday: arms, legs, and body fragments…. By nighttime, relatives had identified 21 of the 23 bodies brought to the surface. According to information from MChS, the next day, the list of dead had reached 42 people, based on the number of bodies found. By yesterday, 27 of them had been identified. Five people were listed as missing.
A Hole
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| Photo: Sergei Gavrilenko |
| Relatives of the miners waited for information on the number of dead in the mine office conference room. |
Governor of Kemerovo Region, Aman Tuleev, who was in charge of the emergency headquarters, was also taciturn. Members of the press were not allowed to get anywhere near him, and then he gave orders to send them away altogether and not allow journalists or any other outsiders not involved in the rescue operations into Osinniki. The relatives of the trapped miners also left the governor alone; they weren’t in the mood to see him. They had already found out that night after Mr. Tuleev left that they would receive compensation and assistance.
Mobile communications do not work in the area of the tragedy. Taizhina is located in a sort of hole, and even if communications are not broken off immediately, at best you can catch a couple of words through the crackling. Access to the two regular telephones was restricted, especially after the top brass arrived.
Preliminary data on the causes of the disaster at Taizhina were known by Saturday. Aman Tuleev told Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov about it over the phone. The Kuzbass administration’s press service reported that there had been a “large emission of methane, which had exploded, causing blockage of many of the underground workings” in the mine. A special government commission led by Sergei Oganesyan, head of the Federal Energy Agency, will be conducting a thorough investigation of the disaster. Their conclusions can already be guessed: as usual in these cases, they will include a violation of safety measures, poor employee training, and errors made by personnel. The Prosecutor’s Office in Osinniki has already commenced an action under Article 216, Part 3 of the RF Criminal Code (violation of safety rules during mining operations causing the death by negligence of two or more persons).
The disaster at Taizhina was one of the worst in Kuzbass history in terms of number of victims. It is comparable to the explosions at the Shevyakov mine in Mezhdurechensk in December 1991, in which 25 people died, and at the Zyryanovskaya mine in Novokuznetsk in 1997, when 67 miners died. Saturday’s tragedy was the second major accident at Kuzbass mines this year. The first was caused by a methane explosion at the Sibirskaya mine in Anzhero-Sudzhensk on January 10. Five people were killed and 16 suffered burns, other injuries, and poisoning by combustion products of methane and coal dust; one of these victims died.
According to information from Viktor Khramtsov, head of the Kuznetsk District Federal Mine and Industrial Supervision (Gosgortekhnadzor), the death rate among Kuzbass miners remains very high, “an order of magnitude higher than in developed countries”. According to Mr. Khramtsov, “there is evidence of criminal violation of safety measures at the mines, which results in serious accidents causing death of people, and incompetent work by rescue services. According to their reports, the special equipment at the mines is always ready for accidents, but then it turns out that it’s not ready at all.”
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Accidents and Injuries in the Kuzbass in 2003
According to data of the Kuznetsk District Gosgortekhnadzor, 2154 people were injured at Kuzbass coal companies in 2003, 61 of them fatally (53 in underground operations). Fatal accidents occurred at 23 mines and 8 open pits in the basin. Seventy-seven people, 22 of whom died, suffered in 16 accidents caused by methane explosions and bursts (three more than in 2002). Material damage from accidents amounted to 133.4 million rubles (nearly triple the figure for 2002). As noted at the annual meeting on the state of labor protection and industrial safety at Kuzbass coal companies held in February of this year, degassing of coal seams and construction of up-to-date ventilation systems at Kuzbass mines is proceeding too slowly. Investigations into the causes of accidents at the Ziminka mine in Prokopevsk (June 2003 and January 2004) and the Sibirskaya mine in Anzhero-Sudzhensk (January 2004) showed that mine personnel were ill-prepared for accidents and often did not know what to do if an accident occurred. This applied to employees at all levels, from miners to the chief engineer.
Ten Worst Mine Disasters in Russia
Olga Kochetova, Igor Lavrenkov, Kemerovo
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 12, 2004
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