Search for blast victims continues

OSINNIKI, Russia -- The coal-blackened faces of exhausted rescuers and the red-rimmed eyes of anxious relatives told a grim story of disappearing hope Sunday, a day after a methane blast tore through a Siberian mine, killing at least 42 miners.\nFive miners remained missing in the latest disaster to strike Russia's hardscrabble coal country. "Most likely, they will all be corpses," said the head of a commission dealing with the disaster.\nThe blast occurred early Saturday about 1,840 feet down in the Taizhina mine in a coal-rich strip of western Siberia called the Kuzbass.\nSunday emergency officials plotted rescue and recovery strategies at one end of the mine's Soviet-era administration building, while grieving relatives sat or milled nervously in a rundown auditorium dominated by a painting of a strong, smiling miner carrying flowers.\n"They told me to wait," said Tatyana Fatykhova, 34, whose husband, Rashid, was underground when the blast occurred.\n"They've pulled up some bodies, but they haven't identified them yet."\nHer husband's name was not on the list of identified victims posted by the stairwell.\nThe head of a government commission created to deal with the disaster, Sergei Ovanesyan, said it was "practically impossible" any of those still missing would be found alive.\nOf the 42 bodies found, 36 had been retrieved and 29 of those had been identified, said officials overseeing the recovery effort.\nMore than 600 miners work at the mine in the city of Osinniki, Russia, according to ITAR-Tass. Taizhina opened in 1998, but was built on the foundation of a closed mine and the equipment shown on Russian television stations appeared to be run-down.\nRescue workers dug underground toward the blast site from two sides -- Taizhina and an adjacent mine in Osinniki, a sprawling community of ramshackle homes and crumbling buildings set amid barren hills streaked with snow.\nA handful of rescue workers discarded oxygen tanks and lit up cigarettes after a shift underground.\nAsked if there was hope of finding anyone alive, one of the rescuers shook his head to mean "no." The men refused to talk about the conditions underground, but the Interfax news agency said the area was filled with carbon dioxide and Ekho Moskvy radio said work was hampered by heavy smoke.\nDeputy Prosecutor General Valentin Simuchenkov said the blast occurred after the concentration of methane gas in the mine increased by roughly 10-fold in a short period of time.\nInvestigators will try to determine what made the methane level increase so quickly and what triggered the blast, Simuchenkov said, adding that an earthquake or the shifting of coal plates were among the potential causes of the buildup.\nA criminal investigation was opened into suspicions of safety violations, he said.\nAccidents are common in the Russian coal industry, but Saturday's disaster was the deadliest in the Kuzbass since 1997, when a methane blast at a mine in nearby Novokuznetsk, Russia, killed 67.\nAt Taizhina, about 1,850 miles east of Moscow, one miner was killed in September 2002 when the roof of a ventilation shaft collapsed.\nSaturday's blast occurred the day before Easter, the most important holiday for Russia's predominant Orthodox Christian faith and a time when families gather to celebrate.\nHeading back into town on a bus, a worker at the adjacent mine scoffed at the notion that following safety rules would prevent disasters at Russia's dilapidated mines, saying much of the equipment is decades old and "should just be thrown away."\nThe miner, who called himself Alexei but refused to give his last name for fear of repercussions, said he tries not to think about the risk his job entails.\n"If you think about it too much, you get a different job," he said.