The Russian emergency services say the dead include six rescue workers. Photo: AP

Moscow: Thirty-six people are dead after Russia's worst coal-mining accident in years, with authorities abandoning rescue efforts in the northern town of Vorkuta.

 Descending into the smoking pit of a coal mine after methane explosions set off underground fires, six rescue workers were killed on Sunday in a failed attempt to reach 26 stranded miners in northern Russia.

Russia's most senior federal disaster official declared on the same day that the rescue operation over and all of the missing miners, who had been trapped by a cave-in, dead.

Rescuers listen to instruction in Vorkuta, Russia. Photo: AP

"The circumstances in the affected part of the mine did not allow anyone to survive," Vladimir Puchkov, minister of emergency situations, said in televised comments. "In the underground space where the 26 miners were, there were high temperatures and no oxygen".

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"This is a terrible tragedy for Russia and for our coal industry," Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich​ said.

The mine fire, more than 760 metres underground, was to be extinguished by starving it of oxygen, Denis Paikin, the technical director at Vorkutaugol, which runs the facility, said. An alternative would be to partly flood the pit.

Rescuers getting on an elevator in Vorkuta, Russia. Photo: AP

The bodies of four miners were recovered after the initial disaster on Thursday when methane gas, a common hazard in coal seams, exploded in two locations about in the Severny mine.

The disaster struck in one of the harshest environments for mining, in the Arctic coal town of Vorkuta, far north of Moscow in the European portion of Russia.

In the post-Soviet period, tens of thousands of miners left the town and several shafts were abandoned, but the rich coal deposits remained a lure for companies to operate there, despite the hardship.

Poor safety standards have plagued coal mines in Russia and other former Soviet republics. After a methane explosion in a Siberian mine killed 108 miners in 2007, in the worst such disaster in recent Russian history, the authorities fired five mine safety inspectors for allowing the site to operate even though a methane gas detector had been deliberately disabled to avoid the expense of halting work during gas buildups.

With rescue efforts over at the Severny mine, mining engineers with Vorkutaugol, a subsidiary of Severstal, a Russian steel maker, were considering ways to extinguish the coal fires still blazing underground.

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Eighty of the 110 men who were underground at the time of the explosion were pulled to safety.

New York TImes, DPA

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