MOSCOW (Reuters) – Miners were being evacuated from a coal mine owned by Russian steel producer Evraz in the Kemerovo region after a fire broke out, local emergency services said on Tuesday.
“Evacuation of the miners is being carried out,” the Kemerovo emergency services said, reporting that a degassing box had caught fire on the surface.
“There was a report of a fire on the territory of the Yerunakovskaya mine, the mine was stopped, the workers are independently rising to the surface,” Interfax quoted emergency services as saying earlier.
Evraz and mine operator Raspadskaya did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Interfax quoted a Raspadskaya spokesperson as saying that the fire would not affect operations.
The fire is not in the mine itself, but associated with a “surface fan”, it said.
“There is no open fire, but people are being taken out according to regulations,” Interfax quoted the spokesperson as saying.
There were more than 250 miners in the mine at the time of the fire, Interfax reported.
(Reporting by Reuters; writing by Alexander Marrow; editing by Kirsten Donovan and Jason Neely)
