KYIV, July 22 – Six workers were killed by a methane gas explosion that ripped through a Ukrainian coal mine Sunday, officials said. The blast came two weeks after a fire killed 35 coal workers at another Ukrainian mine. The death toll from the explosion at the Yuvileina mine in Pershotravensk, in Ukraine’s eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, stood at six, said a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry. He said the last of the 423 miners underground at the time of the blast had been found and brought to the surface. Fourteen of them were hospitalized, including two in serious condition.
Ukraine’s largely unprofitable mines have one of the world’s highest accident rates due to poor maintenance and serious neglect of safety regulations. Before Sunday’s blast, 159 miners had been killed on the job this year, according to the State Labor Safety Committee.
Committee chief Serhiy Sturchak attributed Sunday’s accident to sliding morale in the struggling coal industry, which fails to pay wages on time and has seen numerous small strikes and protests in recent months. “Everything in the coal industry is cracking at the seams,” Sturchak said, adding that dissatisfaction was causing negligence among both workers and bosses.
A government commission investigating the July 7 fire in the Ukraina mine in the Donetsk region said last week that mine officials violated safety regulations, leading to the deaths of 35 workers. The director of the Ukraina mine and two aides are under investigation and could face up to eight years in prison if convicted of negligence.
More than 3,700 miners have been killed in job-related accidents in Ukraine since 1991. Most of the accidents occur on holidays and weekends, when vigilance tends to be lower. Miners in Ukraine often go months without pay. Last week, hundreds of coal workers blocked traffic in the capital, Kyiv, to demand the government – which subsidizes the industry and owns some mines directly – pay dlrs 230 million in back wages.
