Down a homemade mine shaft in southwestern Poland, a would-be comedian sang in the faint glowing light. The strains of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” in rhythm with a pick ax, rose up from eight yards underground. The song stopped.
“A huge chunk of coal has fallen on my finger!” the miner yelled up the shaft. “Now I can’t pick my nose!”
The sky was black and the stars blazed, especially the constellation Orion. In the nearby city of Walbrzych, the bells had just tolled. It was 9 p.m., the temperature was below freezing, the wind bitter. But for many miners here, in a region known as Lower Silesia, work was just beginning.
The practice of digging coal illegally is often called “rathole mining.” It is better known in places like India, or in South Africa, where illegal mining accidents recently killed five men. But it’s also common in Lower Silesia, near the Czech border.
Poland is Europe’s largest producer of hard coal, and both black and brown coal mines flourish in other parts of the country, from abundant mines in Upper Silesia to the north, to the giant open pit mine in Belchatow, in the east.
But while Germany, Europe’s largest overall coal producer, is aggressively trying to encourage renewable energy sources, Poland has shown far less interest in finding alternatives. More than 88 percent of its electricity is powered by coal, and many people still use it to heat homes.
That dependence means that mining never stopped in Lower Silesia, despite the shuttering of industrial mines in the late 1990s. The mines were deemed to be unprofitable, as well as dangerous. Coal seams are found at steep angles in the region, making machinery hard to use. And hundreds of years of mining tapped out reserves.
“We started to make the switch from a communist economy to a market economy, and these places were not efficient enough for businesses to be interested in them on an industrial scale,” said Pawel Mikusek, a spokesman for the state environmental ministry.
Those kinds of efficiencies helped make Poland an economic model of sorts among its post-Soviet neighbors, and countries like Bulgaria and Ukraine look at its growth rate over the last two decades with envy. But they also cost jobs in places like Walbrzych, where the mayor estimated the unemployment rate at about 15 percent. So unemployed miners continue to dig for black coal on their own. And for younger men here, rathole mining is the only kind of mining they have ever known.
Activists estimate that as many as 3,000 men are engaged in illegal mining in Lower Silesia, though local officials say they believe that the number is much lower. And while coal in Poland is relatively cheap, buying it on the black market here can be 30 or 40 percent cheaper than buying it legally.
A walk in a hilly area outside of town on a recent February night was treacherous. Makeshift mine shafts were all around, waiting to swallow up those unfamiliar with the terrain.
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