A series of omissions that followed the accident in the Soko mine in which eight miners lost their lives have been revealed. However, the court decided that no one was responsible for this accident
The CINS portal published a text that listed the failures they were tracking accident in the Soko mine on April 1, 2022 in which eight miners died. According to the then Minister of Mining and Energy, Zorana Mihajlović, the cause of the worker's death was methane poisoning. Six miners from Aleksinac, one from Vranje and one from Sokobanja died in the accident.
After the end of March this year The higher public prosecutor's office in Nis rejected the objection of the lawyers of the families of the miners who died in the Soko mine, the decision of the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Aleksinac remained in force that no one was responsible for the accident.
As a basic omission for this accident CINS states that the competent mining inspection has looked down on the Soko mine for years.
What did the inspection find?
A few hours after the accident, on April 2022, XNUMX, the Soko mine was visited by the only mining inspector in the country at that time - Zorica Vukadinović.
She found that Soko does not have permission to carry out mining works in that part of the Mine.
It's not just any document - without it, the mine wouldn't be able to work at all. The approval states where and how the coal will be mined, what the tunnels will be like, what kind of ventilation and the like. Practically, working without approval is like building without a building permit.
The Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS) reveals that the mining inspection of the Ministry of Mining and Energy knew years before the accident that Soko did not have this approval and ordered Rudnik to obtain it.
In November 2016, the then mining inspector Milanko Savić gave Rudnik six months to obtain approval. As this did not happen, the inspector ordered the same thing again in 2017, but nothing changed even then.
Soko continued to work without a permit until the accident, although the inspection could have banned him from working.
What does the law say?
According to the Law on Mining and Geological Surveys, if the inspector determines that the mine is operating without permission to perform mining works, he is authorized to prohibit its operation. However, the inspection did not do that, nor did it control the Mine as it should have - at least twice a year.
By the way, Milanko Savić, who as an inspector found that the Mine did not have approval, is now employed at the public company Resavica, within which the Soko mine operates. At the same time, Savić works in the Ministry of Mining and Energy, which is responsible for controlling Resavica. The Ministry did not respond to CINS' questions.
Ventilation off
Another reason given was the fact that the ventilation in Rudnik stopped, although it was not supposed to.
Immediately before the accident, the electricity went out in Rudnik. It's no accident. In the area where the miners were digging, methane was more than the allowed 1,5 percent. In that situation, the usual procedure is to turn off the electricity, because methane is an easily flammable gas and can lead to an explosion, according to the CINS text.
Along with the electricity, the ventilation was also turned off - which should not have happened, according to the experts CINS spoke with. Ventilation is important in a mine because it brings fresh air from the surface and can also blow methane out of the pit.
Mining and mechanical engineer, Predrag Dimovski, otherwise a court expert for mining, stated in an interview with CINS that the injured miners would have survived if the ventilation had worked, because methane would have blown out at the time of the accident.
CINS reveals that the ventilation in the Soko mine stopped working when the electricity was automatically cut off for safety reasons, because the fans were connected to the substation together with other devices - which should not be the case, experts say.
Dimovski explains that ventilation should have its own substation, which is independent from everything else.
One of the four professors of the Faculty of Mining and Geology who were experts on the accident for the Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Aleksinac, and who agreed to speak for CINS - Branko Gluščević - agrees with him.
He confirmed that the substation stopped because the methane level at that place in Rudnik crossed the critical limit. With that, the fan turned off.
"It happens." It's nothing unusual. If you ask me whether it should be - in principle, it should not be left without fresh wind power at the excavation itself," said Gluščević.
The miners worked until the very end, and had to be withdrawn
The amount of methane in the pit is monitored on screens from the dispatch center, while some miners have methane meters with them. Methane detectors are also distributed throughout the pit.
According to the State Rulebook on Technical Norms for Underground Coal Mining, when methane in the area where methane is mined exceeds the limit of 1,5%, miners should stop working.
Miner Srđan Colarić, who worked in the Soko mine for 17 years, tells CINS that the procedure is such that the miners retreat to an area with fresh air when methane exceeds the limit of 1,5 percent. He explains that the dispatcher is the one pulling the miners.
However, this was not the case on April 1 when the accident occurred.
From the recordings of the conversations that were recorded on the night of the accident, and obtained by CINS, the dispatcher can be heard repeatedly informing the miners that the methane is elevated. At one point he says the methane is five percent, but doesn't tell them to back off. CINS journalists failed to interview dispatcher Emina Milovanović Stamenković, who was working that night.
Instead of seeking cover, the miners worked until the very end - until one of them shouted "let's run".
Part of the miners started to run away. Some of them fainted, but eight of them died.
One of the surviving miners, Saša Dimitrijević, remembers fainting with a tool in his hands:
"They were dead, and I was three meters away from them." I'm under them, as I fell, so it's a meter and a half, well, that height with all the dirt. They say 'you hugged me like a Bosko Buha bomb'".
The full text of the failures that accompanied the Soko mine accident, as well as all podcasts on this topic read on the CINS portal.
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