A coal-mine fire sparked by underground tremors in northeastern China's Liaoning province killed 26 miners and injured 50 others early Wednesday, Xinhua News Agency reported.
Around 1 a.m. Wednesday, the blaze spread through the coal mine after a minor earthquake created sparks, igniting coal dust in the air, which eventually lead to a fierce fire breaking out in a complex shaft run by the state-owned Fuxin Coal Corp. in Liaoning province, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Of the injured, 30 have suffered serious burns, eight are in intensive care and four have life-threatening injuries, the official news service said, citing Liaoning Fuxin Coal Corp.'s hospital.
China, the world's biggest coal producer, is known to have one of the worst mine-safety records since old pits have been kept open in order to meet demand for the fuel, the Associated Press reported.
Even though recent improved safety measures have considerably lowered death tolls in accidents, the country still plans to close as many as 2,000 sites by the end of 2015 for safety reasons, according to authorities.
Following the disaster, a mine supervisor reached by telephone said he was unable to immediately provide further details and declined to give his name, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, a gas blast at a separate mine owned by Fuxin killed more than 200 people in 2005, according to the State Administration of Work Safety. In 2013, about 1,067 deaths were reported to have occurred in 604 coal mining accidents, down 23 percent from the year before, the government's China National Coal Administration stated.
In the U.S., the world's second-largest producer of the commodity, 20 people died from coal mining accidents in 2013, according to government figures.
Fuxin Coal, founded in 1949, has 10 producing mines with approved capacity of 9.65 million metric tons, data from Ecoal China show.
