Severstal Coal Mine Blasts Kill as Many as 36 Workers in Russia

The death toll in Russia’s worst mining disaster in recent history climbed to 36 on Sunday as officials said 26 missing workers could not have survived and another six, most of them rescuers, had been killed in a new explosion.

On Thursday, four miners were killed when a methane explosion ripped through the Severnaya mine in Arctic Russia at a depth of 748 metres (2,450 feet).

“According to the expert technical council, 26 (missing) people who were in the mine had no chances of surviving,” Tatyana Bushkova, a spokeswoman for the mine’s operator Vorkutaugol, told AFP on Sunday.