Owner pleges to invest $1.75 million into safety at Luhansk Oblast mine.
The July 29 accident at Sukhodilska-Skhidna coal mine, which claimed 28 lives, prompted coal mine owners to fire the director and other top officials they blame for the accident.
In addition, the mine’s parent company Krasnodonugol, owned by Ukraine’s richest individual Rinat Akhmetov, pledged to invest $1.75 million this year into safety at Sukhodilska-Skhidna in Luhansk Oblast. The company also pledged to introduce a new system of bonuses in which miners will be paid more for abiding by safety rules.
According to Krasnodonugol’s Aug. 22 statement, coal mine director Pavlo Moiseenko was terminated by mutual consent.
Serhiy Melnyk, the new director, must ensure “the strictest abidance to the labor safety rules by every coal miner,” said Oleksandr Potapenko, Krasnodonugol’s general director.
Responding to Kyiv Post inquiries, the press service of Krasnodonugol said that six employees in total have been fired from the Sukhodilske-Skhidna mine in connection with the accident. They include the main engineer and deputy director of safety.
Ukraine’s coal mines are notorious for their outdated equipment, dire working conditions, low pay and mortality rates among the world’s highest.
Experts note the situation at Akhmetov-owned mines is generally better than at the rest of the more than 100 mines in the nation.
But, they say, opaque dealings – such as the sale of coal at below-market prices through murky intermediaries – mean that state and private mines alike rarely receive the capital investments needed to improve safety and increase wages of miners.
The decision to fire top managers at Sukhodilske-Skhidna comes in the aftermath of a deadly accident on July 29 that claimed 28 lives.
Ukraine’s coal mines are notorious for their outdated equipment, dire working conditions, low pay and mortality rates among the world’s highest.
Experts, coal miners and trade union leaders alike blamed the tragedy on pressure from the owners and managers to increase production. As the result, miners would often work in the pit, ignoring the safety precautions as their relatively low wages are tied to output.
Surprisingly, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Mykola Azarov joined the critics, blaming the accident on the greed of mine owners and managers.
His version of the accident at Sukhodilska-Skhidna somewhat corresponds with the conclusion made by the government commission which investigated causes of the accident. In a recently published report, Derzhhirpromnahliad, a state agency overseeing the mining industry, stated that safety violations during the blast works at Sukhodilska-Skhidna led to the accident.
After conducting a series of blasts in the shaft, air wasn’t sufficiently cleared of coal dust due to the malfunction of ventilation equipment, according to the report. Work resumed without checking the methane level, thus causing the methane explosion.
The government report named 13 people responsible for the accident, including five supervisors who died in the accident.
The report also names nine mid-level and top managers of Sukhodilska-Skhidna and Krasnodonugol, including the mine’s director and the parent company’s chief power engineer and mechanic.
Specifically, the commission found the now dismissed director Moiseenko responsible for “lessening the demands from the officials to abide to the working discipline,” and recommended that six of his subordinates are fired.
The firings and investigative results failed to impress Mykhailo Volynets, head of the Independent Trade Union of Coal Miners and a parliament member in opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc.
In his view, the commission didn’t go far enough to investigate the reasons behind the accident – a pay system which encourages miners to ignore safety.
Volynets wants the court to revoke the commission.
He is appealing the government’s decision not to let representatives of the trade union take part. “The government didn’t want an objective investigation,” he said.
Volynets is unimpressed with the Krasnodonugol decision to replace the coal mine director by “mutual consent.” It smacks of collusion, he said, adding: “You find a person to blame, let him rest for a month, and then employ him at some other place.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected]
