Three Mining Disasters Take 159 Lives in Russia

The last three major mining disasters in Russia’s Kemerovo and Vorkuta Regions, which took 159 lives in three months, are a clear indication that the system of mining safety in the country is making miners hostages of profitability.

Officially, the two methane explosions in Kemerovo resulted from faulty cables, which short-circuited and detonated the mixture of methane, air, and coal dust. Systems used at the mine to automatically localise and suppress explosions all failed (and were later prohibited for use in all Russian mines).

The high concentration of methane remained undetected because the mines’ gas detection systems were tampered with. Meters showed methane concentration in the mines to be significantly less than it actually was, and the complete power shut-down, which would normally prevent any short-circuiting in such situations, therefore never took place.

Ruben Badalov, First Vice President of the ICEM-affiliated Russian Independent Coal Miners’ Union (ROSUGLEPROF), and a member of the Russian State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, was on the federal investigatory team at the Ulianovskaya mine. Probing beyond the immediate causes, he exposes several indirect ones, whose nature cannot be reduced simply to matters of production discipline.

These indirect causes fall into a number of categories: from mistakes in the extraction estimates to assumptions of legal “liberalisation” of the whole mining safety control system. This makes it virtually impossible for public supervisory agencies, like Rostechnadzor, or the union’s own inspectors, to enforce timely closures of unsafe mines. The common denominator for all the categories is a lack of regulatory mechanisms in the industry where the rule of the market is largely unchecked.

“The actual methane content of the coal seam at the Ulianovskaya mine turned out to be several times higher than the project estimates," says Badalov, himself a mining engineer with extensive experience.

“Moreover, the intensive extraction schedule contributed to the release of still greater amounts of methane into the mine, which was never properly degassed – a costly procedure. The roof was defined in the project documentation as highly resistant to caving and prone to overhanging. At the same time, the seam liability to rock bumps had been assumed to manifest itself ten metres below the level where the explosion took place. As a result, no precautionary measures, such as preventive degassing of the mine, or induced caving of the roof, had been scheduled. It was during the uncontrolled caving of 70 metres of the overhanging roof that huge amounts of methane were momentarily released into the mine.”

Both mines were designed by the same people, belonging to the same school of mining engineering, and while the licensing procedure is still in place, there’s no meaningful quality control as the development of the mining science in Russia was hindered by lack of support from the state.

Ruben Badalov maintains that, as a purely commercial approach inevitably brings a temptation to simplify processes and disregard relevant specificities, there must be state supervision of all engineering work related to hazardous production processes.

The Kuzbass disasters once again highlight the existing disparity between the fixed component of the coal miner’s wages and the productivity-driven parts. The drop in income during outages to less than half of regular wages pushes miners to reckless behaviour. At the Yubileinaya mine, all it took to deceive the gas detection system was a piece of cloth wrapped around a gas sensor.

“This doesn’t stimulate productivity, this stimulates coal extraction at any cost,” says Badalov. In the course of the Federal Industry Agreement negotiations earlier this year, ROSUGLEPROF tabled a proposal to raise the fixed part of the wages to 70%, and although the target could not be achieved uniformly and in full, there were companies who were prepared to take this figure as a reference point.