Rescuers have located four of ten people missing following a tremor at a coal mine in southern Poland on Saturday. “We have informed the families that we have located the four employees,” said Marcin Golebiowski, a senior official at the Zofiowka mine where the accident occurred, adding that for the moment there were “no contact with these employees.
According to a statement from JSW, after locating the miners, the rescuers had to withdraw for lack of “oxygen in their cylinders”. The mining of miners will be continued by the following teams.
Second mine accident this week
Saturday morning, at 3:40 a.m., a major tremor occurred 900 meters deep in the Zofiowka mine. It was accompanied by a major methane leak. Following the earthquake, ten miners were reported missing. This is the second such accident this week in Poland, which still depends on coal for almost 70% of its energy.
On Wednesday, a firedamp explosion in the Pniowek mine, about six kilometers away from Zofiowka, and also belonging to JSW, caused the death of five people. There was no news of seven others who were still in the mine while the rescue operation, deemed “dangerous” after several other methane explosions, was officially abandoned on Friday. Twenty people were hospitalized, including six for serious burns following this accident.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who visited the scene on Saturday, stressed that the two accidents will be “verified very meticulously” to determine whether they are simple accidents due to natural causes or “whether errors have been committed”.
42 miners unharmed
On Saturday morning, fifty-two miners were near where the tremor took place. Forty-two of them were able to return to the surface unscathed. Twelve rescue teams were involved in the rescue operation. In 2018, in another accident at the same mine, five people died.
Poland has experienced other mining accidents in recent years. In the latest, in March 2021, two miners died and two others were injured in an accident at the Myslowice-Wesola mine in the south of the country. In 2021, the mining sector employed nearly 80,000 people in Poland.