Fire traps 31 at Russian gold mine

MOSCOW, Sep 7 (Reuters) Rescuers battled thick smoke and blistering temperatures today as they tried to reach more than 30 miners trapped underground by a fire at a gold mine in Siberia.

Sixty-four miners were underground when welding work caused the fire in the central shaft of the Darasun mining complex in Russia's remote Chita region on the Chinese border, emergency officials said.

Some miners managed to crawl to safety through a tunnel.

Rescuers were trying to bring the rest of the men to the surface through a horizontal tunnel linked to a second vertical shaft, 5 km (3 miles) from the blaze.

But one rescue team was forced to return to the surface because of high temperatures and thick smoke more than 10 hours after the fire started. Officials said rescuers were working through the night to reach the trapped miners.

''Thirty-three people have been rescued and 31 are still trapped in the mine,'' said a spokeswoman for the Emergencies Ministry in Chita, 5,000 km east of Moscow.

''We have no information on any dead or injured, because we have no contact with the trapped miners,'' she added.

BLAZE STILL RAGING There were conflicting reports about whether the fire, which broke out at 0945 hrs ist at a depth of 85 to 135 metres, was still raging.

Emergency officials said the fire was localised around 1730 hrs ist but a local member of the regional administration, quoted by Interfax, denied this.

''Several rescue teams belonging to the Ministry of Emergency Situations as well as the company's own local emergency units are working to evacuate the miners remaining underground and to contain and extinguish the fire,'' the mine's owners, Highland Gold, said in a statement.

A team of 18 rescuers were forced to come to the surface because of high temperatures and thick smoke, the local official at the scene told Interfax.

Ivan Koulakov, deputy chairman of London-listed Highland Gold, was to fly to Darasun later on Thursday with a team of mining and safety experts to aid the rescue operation.

The Darasun mine, the smaller of Highland Gold's two main gold projects in Russia, produced 11,761 ounces of gold in the first half of this year, or around 13 per cent of the company's total production.

Highland Gold has forecast total gold output this year of 180,000-185,000 ounces. The company is one-fifth owned by Canada's Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold miner.

Its shares fell by 4.5 per cent in London after news of the fire.

Russia's gold mines have a generally better safety record than the more hazardous coal mining industry, which has been plagued by fatal accidents since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Underinvestment, low pay and sloppy safety standards have been blamed for a series of mining disasters, the most recent of which was a blast at a Siberian coal mine in 2005 in which more than 20 died.

REUTERS KD KP2206