RUSSIA: Methane explosion kills at least 61 people at the Ulyanovskaya mine in Siberia's Kemerovo region

A methane explosion killed 61 people when it ripped through a coal mine in Russia on Monday (March 19), a regional spokesman said, the deadliest accident in the area in about three years. At least 64 miners remained underground several hours after the explosion at the Ulyanovskaya mine, in Siberia's Kemerovo region. Rescue workers were saying the evacuation was being hampered by smoke underground. President Vladimir Putin ordered his emergencies minister to fly to the mine to oversee the rescue. Television footage from the pit showed one miner lying motionless, his clothes black with dirt, before emergency workers transferred him into an ambulance. The spokesman for the regional administration said 186 miners had been underground when the blast occurred at about 0800 GMT and that 88 had been safely brought up to the surface while 37 were still believed to be underground. The blast was the latest in a long line of fatal accidents in Russian mines, many of which are several decades old and lack modern equipment. Last year, 25 Russian miners died in a fire at a gold mine in eastern Siberia. A gas explosion at a coal mine in Kemerovo in 2004 killed 45 people.

ITN Source | March 20, 2007

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