A methane blast in a mineshaft in Russia’s Siberia killed at least 10 people and injured 30 on Thursday, a government spokesman said.
The blast ripped through the mine as a 45-strong repair team was patching up part of the Listvyazhnaya mine, near Russia’s border with Mongolia.
“Sadly, the news is very unpleasant. Ten people were killed, 30 people have been evacuated and are all injured in one way or another,” said Sergei Chernov, spokesman for the government of the Kemerovo region, Russia’s top coal-mining area.
“Around 100 people were underground at the time, but only 45 were in the region of the accident.”
The Emergencies Ministry in Moscow earlier said 240 people were underground when the explosion occurred at 9.45 a.m. (0145 GMT) in a region four times zones east of Moscow.
Russian news agencies reported that nine brigades of rescue workers controlled by the local governor were searching for survivors.
Accidents are common in Russia’s loss-making collieries, many of which date back to dictator Josef Stalin’s 1920s industrialization drive and where safety procedures are largely unchanged since Soviet times.
A blast in the Kemerovo region in April killed 45 miners, and a flooded mineshaft last October trapped 11 miners underground for a week in a mine near Ukraine.