Rescue Workers from all over the World Meet in Ostrava

OSTRAVA – The opening of the 4th International Conference of the International Mines Rescue Body (IMRB), hosted on September 21 – 25 by the Main Mines Rescue Station (HBZS) in Ostrava, was successful and, especially, industrious. This international conference of mine rescue workers is the largest and most important event of its kind.

It is attended by representatives of countries with advanced mining industries from all over the world. It is an open forum for the exchange of experience and is very popular with rescue workers. On the first day of the meeting the delegates from 20 countries from all over the world were divided into four working groups according to their fields of interest. One group went down the Darkov mine, to coalface 40 204 equipped with modern POP 2010 programme mining technology; the other three groups visited the Main Mines Rescue Station in Ostrava.

“I am very happy the weather was good. We were able to demonstrate some of our rescue activities to the delegates and show them all our technology. Some of these things cannot be seen anywhere else and that is why I think the delegates were satisfied with their visit. In any case, they appreciated it highly,” said the director of the host company – OKD, HBZS – Václav Pošta about his first impressions from the meeting with the delegates.

“The demonstration of the mine rescue technology was really thrilling. I think that the equipment at the host’s rescue station is among the best in the world,” said one of the conference delegates, Mr Debdulal Baidya, the superintendent of mines rescue in Singareni (India).

The working part of the conference is taking place in Hradec nad Moravicí where the participants were welcomed by Mr Klaus-Dieter Beck, CEO of OKD and chairman of the board (Please see the text thereinafter), and also by Mr Milan Pěgřimek, chairman of the Czech Mining Authority. The principal technical theme of this year’s meeting is the efficiency of rescue action under the ground. The programme included, for example, a presentation of their experience by the rescue workers who took part in the rescue operation during the fire in the Warnt/Luisenthal mine in Germany in 2004.

“Mine rescue is an extraordinary discipline that requires interdisciplinary and international knowledge for its further development. That is why there is such a need for a global exchange of information, irrespective of whether we can apply the acquired knowledge in our own work or not,” told Mirosław Bagiński, the technical director of the Central Mine rescue Station (CSRG) in Bytom (Poland).

That is why, he stressed, cross border cooperation between CSRG and the HBZS in Ostrava, which has now been going on for 50 years, has been such a benefit for Polish mine rescue.

(Bohuslav Krzyžanek)

Ostrava, September 22^nd, 2009

Speech at the opening of the 4th International Mines Rescue Conference Sep 21st to Sep 25 in the Czech Republic

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues from around the world,

It is a great pleasure for me to host this 4th International Mines Rescue Conference here in the Czech Republic. As some of you might know, the Czech rescue professionals were among the first to join this statutory body of rescue professionals from various countries. The prime interest of the members focuses on exchanging know-how and best practices in preventing extraordinary events at our mining activities but sadly also fighting consequences of nature’s power and technical deficiencies of equipment employed in the mines.

Hence, it is very sad that this conference is overshadowed by the tragic accident at the end of last week at the Wujek-Slask mine, a few kilometers across the border in Poland. This accident demonstrates the importance of mine rescue professionalism still needed in our times, even though technology is so advanced.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to you on behalf of all OKD employees (OKD which stands for Ostravsko Karvinske Doly means mines in the Ostrava Karvina region). But as you know OKD’s subsidiary company HBZS (Hlavní báňská záchranná služba, which means Main Mining Rescue Service) is the organizer of this conference, with Václav Pošta as its leader. Many thanks go to Václav and his team for preparing this event with great care and for picking this beautiful chateau as the meeting point.

Since we will hear a lot of technical details over the next days, I would like to briefly provide you with a couple of historic facts about this mining area and OKD, assuming you either did not read through our web page, our you simply got scared about the Czech version and did not notice that there is also an English version available.

Mining of coal started in this region more than two hundred years ago in 1753. Larger scale mining activities were developed in the 19^th hundred. In 1843 the Austrian banker Salomon Mayer Rothschild bought the mines and created the raw material base for industrialization of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and production grew up to 10 million tons per year around 1900. By the way, the Rothschilds´ remained shareholders continuously (except for 1942 to 1945) until the nationalization in 1946. In the first half of the 20^th century production went up and peaked at 20 million tons during the Second World War.

In 1946, after nationalization, OKD was founded as a state-owned company and was developed to one of the biggest company entities in than Czechoslovakia, including transportation, real estate, steel producing entities, manufacturing and construction companies. 

In 1980 the highest ever production was achieved of almost 25 million tons a year. In 1989, after the velvet revolution happened, a quick rationalization of Ostrava mines took place with a substantial reduction of the workforce and a gradual privatization of individual entities.  Between 1990 and 2001, coal production was stopped at 14 mining territories in the Ostrava and Petřvald area, a coal district covering about 180 km² on the surface.

In 2004 RPG Industries, which belonged and still belongs basically to two individual entrepreneurs, acquired a majority stake in OKD and they went public with 36.5% of the company in 2008 at the stock exchanges in Prague, London and Warsaw under the name New World Resources-NWR.

Last year, OKD produced about 12.5 million tons of metallurgical and thermal coal with 5 mines, condensed to 4 management units with about 18,500 employees.

We have plans to mine coal for at least 20 more years. Our technical mineable coal reserves left at our active operations are still some 500 million tons. Of course we are mining coal under very difficult geological conditions, where longwall panels often have much less than 500,000 tons of coal, where we are facing gassy and bounce prone situations and temperatures at 1,000 m operational depth force us to start implementing intense air-conditioning efforts.

We do not receive any subsidies and still we have to remain profitable. Even when mine owners were changing, political systems were overthrown and transformed, the only stability we had and have is the quality of our coal, the close location of our mines to our main customers and our dedicated and skilled employees.

And, after all the restructuring of OKD over the last years to focus on the core business “mining coal”, one independent company remained within the OKD family: HBZS. We believe that HBZS is contributing to our basic principle „Safety first“ a significant amount.

We are trying to improve work safety in two ways. Beginning last year until 2010, we are investing about 350 million EURO in new production equipment (longwall and gateroad development equipment) and in new and better personal protective gear like boots, lamps, clothing, gas detection devices and self rescuers. For this program, we have created the buzzword “POP 2010 – Productivity Optimization Program until the year 2010”. On top of this we are trying to sensibilize the mindsets of our employees to regard safety as the most valuable issue for all of us.

Dear conference participants,

I believe that hosting this conference here in this mining region of Ostrava, even at difficult economical times demonstrates the importance of the safety issue not only to us but also to you.

I wish you an interesting course of the conference, a lot of casual discussions with your colleagues from all over the world and that the active service of Mine Rescue Teams will be needed in the future less and less, year by year.

Zdař bůh

Klaus-Dieter Beck

OKD CEO

The Press Release about the International Conference is available here.