The number of those killed in an accident at Ukrayina Mine, Donetsk oblast, reached 35 by Monday morning
This is this year’s largest accident at a Ukrainian coal mine that has claimed human lives. Interfax-Ukraine quotes the Emergencies Ministry as saying that the dead miners were found underground in a coal-hauling wagon. Another two affected miners are at a hospital intensive care unit in critical condition. Seven miners, suffering from various degrees of burns, have been sent to a hospital for occupational diseases. According to the Emergencies Ministry, out of the total 107 miners, who were at the depth of 670 meters at the moment of the accident, 74 managed to make their way to the surface. But according to the State Committee for Labor Safety Supervision, there were 114 workers in the mine, including 85 in the area that could have been affected by the accident. To deal with the consequences, the mine summoned 20 paramilitary mine rescue units and 8 search and resuscitation groups, each comprising 18 doctors.
Preliminary conclusions show that the fire was most likely caused by the ignition of fine coal particles (usually 6 mm in size), which in turn caused the miners to be poisoned by carbon monoxide. A governmental commission consisting of representatives of the Cabinet of Ministers, Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, State Committee for Labor Safety Supervision, Ministry of Public Health, Emergencies Ministry, and the Security Service has been set up to inquire about the accident. The commission headed by First Vice Premier Oleh Dubyna is to announce the inquiry results by July 23. Minister for Fuel and Energy Vitaly Haiduk is also now in Donetsk. The place of the tragedy is also waiting for Prosecutor General of Ukraine Sviatoslav Piskun, whom the President instructed to personally study what caused the accident. The government has already decided to furnish the Ministry for Fuel and Energy with UAH 4 million to be utilized as assistance to the victims and the families of those killed. The Ministry of Finance is to take this money from the state budget reserve fund. President Leonid Kuchma has expressed his condolences to the families of those killed in the Ukrayina Mine fire. Viktor Yanukovych, chairman of the Donetsk Oblast Administration, has declared today a day of mourning in the oblast.
Top executives of the Coal Mining Department declined comment to The Day on the situation until the official results of the inquiry are announced. Nor is fully informed the Independent Trade Union of Ukrainian Miners (ITUUM) whose leader Mykhailo Volynets said he doubts that the published information will turn out to be true. He says it is very surprising that no ITUUM members have been included in the investigative commission. Formerly, this trade union was not also excluded from in the inquiry concerning accident at the Zasiadko Mine, the latest major accident which took the toll of 55 lives (45 died on the spot and ten in the hospital).
Anatoly Symonenko, assistant to the ITUUM representative in Donbas, says the tragedy occurred largely because labor safety measures at mines were underfunded: the currently allocated UAH 400 million is, as he put it, inadequate, taking into account the coal extraction technologies currently employed. The minimal requirement of funds for this purpose is about UAH 1.5 billion. This has been further confirmed by the State Committee for Labor Safety Supervision: coal is being extracted today in extremely difficult geological and temperature conditions that exist nowhere else in the world. The coal-extraction average depth has already reached 700 m. 160 mines have not been retooled for over twenty years, with fifty of them having been commissioned over 100 years ago. Only eight mines have been modernized in the past twenty years. With coal production constantly on the decline, there have been more than twenty major accidents with over five fatalities in the past decade that claimed the lives of about 500 miners. While the number of those killed per 1 million tons of the produced coal was 1.54 in 1989, it rose to 4.4 in 2000. Mines with a potential danger of methane explosions (super- accident-prone) and those with a potential danger of coal dust explosions account, respectively, for 75% and 35% of Ukraine’s 209 mines.
According to Mr. Symonenko, those working in a mine often lack life support kits, one of the principal means of protection in a smoke-filled mine tunnel. He says this device, which isolates or filters air in an area of poisoned atmosphere, makes it possible to move for as long as an hour, which is enough to make one’s way out of the tunnel because, under the accident prevention plan, all rescue routes have been designed precisely for this period of time. If movement is impossible and the miner is motionless, the life support kit can protect him for about six hours before the rescuers come. That the Ukrayina miners still suffocated could mean that they perhaps worked with no longer serviceable life support kits on, Mr. Symonenko believes. He says such cases are far from rare: there have been instances when new equipment was sold under the table and miners were issued life support kits whose service life had expired.
