Explosion in Mine a tragic accident: Kazakh President

SHAKHTINSK, Kazakhstan, Sep 21: Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said today an explosion in a coal mine owned by Mittal Steel that killed 41 people was a tragic but unforeseeable accident.

His comments are likely to be seen as all but ruling out any serious legal sanctions against Mittal Steel over the methane gas explosion, the Central Asian state's deadliest mining accident on record.

The blast yesterday morning ripped through a shaft deep below ground in the Lenin mine in Shakhtinsk near Karaganda, one of eight supplying coal to Mittal's huge Temirtau steel factory.

Rescue workers finished the gruesome task of recovering the remains of the 41 dead miners today. A regional forensic expert, Valery Zolotarev, said 37 whole bodies had been brought to the morgue and the rest were fragments.

One of the rescue workers said: ''They'll have to buried in closed coffins ... When we found a body we would collect everything around it. If there was no leg, we looked for a leg, no arm, then look for an arm, no head, then look for a head.'' In the capital Astana, Nazarbayev, a former blast furnace operator at the steel plant during Soviet times, said the Karaganda basin had high concentrations of methane gas.

''These (gas) releases will always happen, we can't guard against it and very much regret it,'' he said. The Karaganda basin, which is about 200 km (125 miles) south of Astana, had greatly improved its safety technology in recent years.

''But it's impossible to foresee everything. The miners know this,'' he said.

Although police are investigating, officials in Kazakhstan take their cues from Nazarbayev, who has led the country since 1989, overseeing massive foreign investment in the oil and mining sectors and rapid economic, but not democratic, reform.

VENTILATOR OFF FOR REPAIRS

Officials gave the first theories on the cause of the blast, 620 metres below ground.

Grigory Prezent, deputy coal department director of Mittal Steel Temirtau told reporters that a ventilator in the shaft had been switched off for repairs. This allowed gas to build up.

Then the electricity was turned on or there was a spark.

''The blast was not that destructive,'' he said, noting that most of the machinery was in one piece. ''But of course the shockwaves were enough to dismember and kill a man.'' Izat Burabekov, director of the local hospital, said six miners had been admitted. Three had been taken to intensive care but they all regained consciousness.

''There are burns to the upper respiratory tract, hands and faces, of about 25-30 per cent on average,'' he said.

One of the miners recovering in the hospital, both hands bandaged, could only say slowly: ''A flash and blast.'' Mittal's Prezent defended the Soviet-era equipment at the Lenin mine, saying ''the equipment is manufactured in the (ex-Soviet) CIS. It is normal, decently working equipment''.

The mine was commissioned in 1964 and was the scene in November 2002 of a gas explosion in which 13 miners were killed.

Yesterday's accident was the deadliest since Kazakhstan became an independent state in 1991. An explosion at another Mittal coal mine in the Central Asian state in 2004 killed 23.

Mittal's Indian-born billionaire owner Lakshmi Mittal, who is expected to visit, paid about 400 million dollars for the steel plant, formerly known as Karmet, in 1995.

Reuters