(Trzebinia) Sudden and increasing land subsidence caused by a former coal mine haunts residents of Trzebinia in southern Poland, who fear for their lives and homes.
Right in the middle of a football stadium in this former mining town, a large gaping black hole stands out well against the lawn covered in freshly fallen snow.
About ten meters wide and deep, it is surrounded, for security reasons, by a metal barrier.
The stadium pitch collapsed on the morning of February 3. Twenty other holes, of different diameters and depths, have appeared across this Silesian city since 2021, including five since the start of the year, causing a wave of panic.
“No one knows where the next chasm will open. We are living on a ticking time bomb,” Mateusz Krol, an official of the council of residents of the Siersza district, where the collapses are the most numerous, told AFP. “The residents are afraid.”
“People fear that a chasm will appear not next to but under their house”, says this IT specialist in his forties, “they avoid taking certain streets for fear of falling into a hole” .
In addition to the stadium, allotment gardens have already been denied access.
The guilty
The culprit is known – the old coal mine closed in 2001.
On the surface, a rusty headframe and a few buildings converted into a museum bear witness to its history.
Under the ground are hidden wells and kilometers of corridors, some of which, the shallowest, date from the end of the 19th century.
After the mine closed, its galleries were flooded. Today, groundwater whose level is increasingly high scour the galleries closest to the surface, causing land subsidence.
“The biggest mistake was to have stopped the operation altogether when the mine worked well for 138 years,” said Jozef Dziedzic, a former miner from Trzebinia, now retired.
Despite the closure of around fifty mines since 1990, Poland remains dependent on coal for its energy survival.
The embargo on Russian energy sources imposed after the invasion of Ukraine, however, pushed Warsaw to import coal from all over the world, particularly for individual heating needs.
“We see what the economic situation is in Europe and in the world, this coal is simply necessary”, launches Mr. Dziedzic.
“He now comes from Venezuela, Australia and we don’t know where yet. And it is not of better quality. »
call for calm
Some specialists, quoted by local media, have already called on the inhabitants of Trzebinia to evacuate, sowing fear.
But the authorities are calling for calm.
“There is of course a risk, and we are all aware of it, but […]for the moment, there is no reason to evacuate the residents,” assures Mariusz Tomalik, spokesman for the Mining Restructuring Company (SRK), a state institution that manages closed mines.
“There have been no casualties or injuries so far. The houses were not damaged”, underlines Piotr Bebenek, spokesman for the local firefighters, confirming however that since last year the subsidences have “significantly intensified”.
The largest hole in September engulfed around 40 cut-stone graves, with around 60 remains, at the local cemetery. With experts deeming the exhumation of the bodies impossible, the hole has since been leveled.
“People were traumatized,” says Mr. Dziedzic.
Two other holes appeared in December a few meters from a house. Since then, to check if other pockets of air and water are there and if they threaten its construction, a drilling installation is working there with great noise.
If a pocket is found, a mixture of sand and cement is injected into it to stabilize the soil.
In total, an area of nearly 300 hectares is affected by subsidence.
An in-depth report is to be made public soon by SRK.
“We will then be able to develop new action scenarios,” says Tomalik.
Mr. Dziedzic remains worried. “Until it’s done, we can’t be sure of anything,” said the septuagenarian.
Despite the danger, the people of Trzebinia want to stay at home.
“We have lived our whole life here, we have our homes and our families, it is not easy to go elsewhere, to emigrate, explains Mr. Dziedzic, we do not transplant old trees”.