All miners were evacuated from a coal mine owned by Russian steel producer Evraz in the Kemerovo region after a fire broke out on Tuesday, the mine’s operator and local emergency services said.
“A fire occurred on the surface,” a spokesperson for the mine’s operator Raspadskaya said.
“All employees were taken out of the mine. Their lives and health are not threatened.”
Russia’s coal-rich Kemerovo region is no stranger to mining disasters. In 2007, it saw the worst mining accident since the collapse of the Soviet Union when an explosion at the Ulyanovskaya mine claimed the lives of more than 100 people. In 2010, explosions at the Raspadskaya mine killed more than 90 people. Another explosion claimed 51 lives in 2021.
The Kemerovo emergency services said an evacuation was being carried out after a degassing box had caught fire on the surface.
Evraz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russian news agency Interfax said there were more than 250 miners in the mine at the time of the fire.
It quoted a Raspadskaya spokesperson as saying that the fire would not affect operations as it was not in the mine itself, but associated with a “surface fan”.
(By Alexander Marrow; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Jason Neely)
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