This news story ties back to my first blog entry, the lyrics to "dark as a dungeon". This just goes to show the harsh realities of coal mining.
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The accident occurred as the men were demolishing a wall in an underground corridor at the Halemba coal mine in the city of Ruda Slaska, said Southern Mining Co., which operates the mine.
Grzegorz Pawlaszek, head of the state-owned Coal Co., said rescue teams had recovered seven bodies from the scene. Another body had been located but couldn’t be reached because the high concentration of methane gas had prompted fears of another explosion.
He said the fate of the other 15 was “not known.”
The men were among a group of 31 miners who had been removing equipment from a shaft that had been closed because it was deemed too dangerous, said Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who flew to the mine and met with rescuers. He said eight miners had managed to escape.
“This is a tragedy. People have died here,” Kaczynski said.
Officials and priests were counseling distraught relatives who gathered at the mine complex. Eight white candles were burning on a low wall outside the main gate.
Rescue workers who had been digging through rock and rubble in hope of finding survivors were monitoring the concentration of gas seeping out before deciding whether to push ahead, Pawlaszek said.
Slim hopes persist
Locator devices carried by the missing miners were emitting no signals, he said. A spokesman for Southern Mining, Zbigniew Madej, said ventilation systems in the mine had also been damaged.
Still, Pawlaszek said, there was a “chance” of finding someone alive.
He said the shaft had been closed in March because the high gas concentrations made further work there too dangerous. But equipment worth $23 million had been left behind.
“It was new equipment and that is why we decided to retrieve it,” Pawlaszek said, adding the work was done under the supervision of specialists in detecting gas.
He said the recovered bodies had burns and were hard to identify because their identification tags had been destroyed in the blast.
‘There is fear’
Miners working in parts of the complex still under operation were shaken.
“There is fear,” said Krzysztof Przybyla, a 34-year-old who said he knew some of those trapped. “This could have happened to any of us.”
Labor unions complain that a lack of investment and massive layoffs in recent years have resulted in falling safety standards at the nation’s mines.
The nearly 50-year-old Halemba mine, located in the heart of the Silesia industrial region, is one of the oldest in the country, and has a record of serious accidents.
In 1990, 19 miners were killed and 20 injured in a gas explosion at the mine. In 1991, five miners were killed in a cave-in. Earlier this year, a miner was rescued after he spent five days underground following a gas explosion.
Poland’s worst mining accidents were in 1974 and 1979 when explosions killed 34 miners each at the Czechowice-Dziedzice in Silesia and the Dymitrow mine in Bytom.
