Grief-stricken relatives collapsed in tears on Tuesday as ambulances delivered their grim load of black plastic body bags to a morgue in Novokuznetsk, a remote Siberian mining town and scene of Russia’s deadliest mine accident.
Four military-style camouflage tents were set up under a leaden sky outside the crumbling morgue. Inside, sobbing could be heard as counsellors tried to help miners’ families cope with the sudden loss of so many local men in a region whose livelihood depends on the coal industry.
Surrounded by a grey sludge of snow and coal dust, dozens of wives and mothers shuddered as they described the physical characteristics of their loved ones before entering the morgue to identify the bodies.
One young man with a desperate look in his eyes went around the assembled relatives, asking each in turn: ”Do you know if there is still anyone alive underground? Is anyone still alive?”
Several women, some wrapped in fur coats against the freezing temperatures, stood smoking, many of them physically supported by relatives. Others made hurried phone calls to confirm news of deaths.
Several kilometres away, at a makeshift counselling centre set up near the Yubileinaya mine, distraught relatives and friends shuffled in a daze, consulting a list of the 106 men confirmed killed in a gas explosion on Monday.
”I lost 43 men in my team,” one coal miner wearing a scuffed orange hard hat commented just after coming back from the ongoing rescue operation, shaking his head in disbelief.
”I’m the only one left. It is just plain luck that I didn’t go down into the mine yesterday [Monday],” said the miner, a man in his 30s with a bloated, sunken face and piercing blue eyes.
The Ulyanovskaya mine where the explosion took place, on a hill in the middle of a pine forest outside Novokuznetsk, is 3 000km east of Moscow, in the coal heartland known as the Kuzbass.
Officials said the mine was equipped with the latest safety equipment in a sector that has suffered from chronic under funding since the fall of the Soviet Union and often uses ageing technology.
Speaking to Agence France-Presse outside the temporary counselling centre, miners who asked not to be named agreed that modern technology was increasingly being used in the Kuzbass, but they sounded sceptical about respect for safety regulations.
”Safety rules? We all have to fulfil production plans. We all want to earn more, so the safety measures aren’t always there,” said another miner in a black leather jacket.
”What safety? It’s all about money,” said another. — AFP
