LIDER NUMERU | PROFILE OF THE LEADER
Honesty, loyalty, trust interview by
K arolina Błońsk a- Szubs tarsk a
K arolina Błońsk a-Szubstarsk a in an interview with Mirosł aw L askowski, the director of the Rudna colliery, who supervised the rescue operation of 19 miners trapped in a mine af ter a coll apse on March 19th, 2013
Of all the rescue operations you’ve been involved in, how important was this one? Mirosł aw L askowski: I have worked on more than ten, but this was the largest by far. What was so special about this operation? Poland’s geological and mining law strictly specifies how rescue operations should be carried out and what actions should be taken. However, this time there were substantial uncertainties and many hard decisions had to be taken. Even the scale of the emergency was unprecedented. In all my years with KGHM there has never been a situation where such a large number of people had been endangered by a collapse. Yet another unique aspect was the timeframe of the operation coupled with the lack of communication with the stranded miners. I had previously been in charge of an operation that lasted ten hours, but during that emergency we were in constant contact with the victim. We knew that he was in good condition and that reaching him was just a matter of time. However, this time the communication had been cut due to the collapse. It is extremely hard to make decisions without all the required data: you have to constantly verify the snippets of
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information you have with different sources. This lengthens the time needed to take action. The number of missing miners, 19, was given to me over an hour after the collapse – after the end of the second shift at midnight when all the returning miners had been counted. The lack of information made it difficult to assess the scope of the emergency. We felt that time was working against us, as we calculated that there were probably some injured people among the miners. The rescue operation was carried out from two different directions. Is this common practice? It is extremely rare to have two different operational bases and two separate base directors. This time such a solution was necessary. All the main access routes to the G-3/4 field from the Rudna mine had been blocked and there was no way to physically get to the miners. We could, of course, clear the tunnels from the Rudna side using heavy equipment, but it would have taken us a lot of time and we were not going to risk that. With this in mind, I decided to also start a rescue operation from the other direction, meaning the Polkowice-Sieroszowice mine, where we moved a few of the rescue teams and some of the equipment. After some time, the director of the Polkowice-Sieroszowice operational base contacted me with a proposition to move the rescuers through a fissure that had been discovered and clear some fifty metres of a tunnel by hand. The decision on whether to go ahead with this plan was one of the factors that made the whole operation so difficult. On the one side, I could have decided to proceed with the heavy machinery, which would have been safer but would also extend the whole operation. On the other hand, I could take the chance offered by the fissure, which would shorten the operation but could also prove dangerous to the rescue teams. One of the key rules of rescue operations is mitigating the additional risks to which the rescuers are exposed.