Kopalnia Węgla Kamiennego Zabrze

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Daytime facilities (museum) by Luise Westfeld with scaffolding Shaft Carnall

The Queen Luise mine (Polish Kopalnia Węgla Kamiennego Zabrze , also Królowa Luiza ) is a decommissioned hard coal mine in Zabrze , Poland.

history

Commissioned by the Prussian state administration to search for hard coal, the mining engineer Solomon Isaac zu Pless (in some sources also Salomon Isaak von Brabant) found a meter-thick coal seam on the surface of the earth with the name Einsiedel (later numbering) in the Czarniawki valley of Pawłów on November 24, 1790 Seam 501). In the following year, more coal seams were found in the Zaborze and Poremba area in several boreholes and so the year 1791 marks the birth of the mine, which was built in 1811 in honor of the Queen of Prussia, Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen-Luise- Mine was called and in 1926 it had a total of 19.60 km².

Queen Luise

Glückaufschacht in Zabrze

The first coal was extracted partly in open-cast mining and partly through gently sloping tunnels. The first dewatering took place in 1795 using a steam-driven pump. The company initially has 63 employees. The good quality of coal meant that the Royal Iron Foundry in Gleiwitz made the first attempts on the European continent to produce blast furnace coke in 1796; so the smelter became the main buyer of coal.

In 1817 the mine employed 190 people whose families lived in the colonies of Małe Zabrze and Pawłów. The problem of the pit drainage for Queen Luise and other mines also from the more distant area of Chorzów was solved by the construction of the master key tunnel, which began in 1799 and was completed in 1868. The water of the 14 km long tunnel was diverted into the Klodnitz and later into the Klodnitz Canal . With a width of 1.50 m and a height of 1.80 m, it was also designed so that boats with a load capacity of 4 tons of coal could drive underground directly from the shafts to the tunnel mouth and transport the coal away.

Since the mine, due to a cabinet order of 1822 with an entitlement of almost 19.60 km², had a huge construction site for the time, it was divided early into a west field ( location ) and an east field ( location ). As early as 1837, those deposits in the west field that could be opened through the tunnel were exhausted. Therefore, between 1838 and 1842, the first underground construction shaft, Dechen, was sunk, which was 73 m deep and 35 m below the hereditary tunnel. A steam-driven pump was used to keep the water flowing. In the next few years three more shafts were sunk in this area, Maria 300 m southwest of Dechen and Oeynhausen and Skalley, which already reached depths of 200 m. In 1858 the pit Krug (140 m) was sunk, in 1868 in the open-cast mining area of ​​Queen Luise Schacht Carnall (200 m). This shaft received a wrought iron headframe in 1877 , a novelty at the time. In 1894, a first large fan with a throughput of 2000 m³ per minute was installed to ensure adequate ventilation. A first sorting plant was also built in 1884 to provide a differentiated coal supply for the market.

In 1870, the pits Poremba I-IV began to be sunk on the border of Zaborze and Poremba, thus heralding the opening of the eastern field. A separation for processing the coal was set up here a few years after that in the Westfeld.

In both fields, backfilling with sand took place where damage from subsidence was to be expected. Of the total of 2.32 million tons of hard coal produced in 1913, 61% was transported by rail to customers further away, mostly to the smelting works in Gleiwitz / Gliwice, but also coked in the immediate vicinity. The coking plant at the Poremba shaft was built in 1884, the one at Skalley in 1890 by Fritz von Friedlaender-Fuld . The town of Zabrze's gasworks also produced its town gas from coal in the mine.

After the referendum in 1922 and the associated division of Upper Silesia, the mine remained with the German Reich; its administration was transferred to Preussag (Preußische Bergwerks- und Hütten Aktiengesellschaft). During this time, Queen Luise had 14 shafts and the west and east fields were managed jointly and were given a joint 41.5 m high coal washing plant.

First of all, production was expanded to the 560 m and 640 m levels and shaking chutes and conveyor belts were used for transport. In addition, 28 electric locomotives were used underground over a total distance of 32 km.

After a massive reduction in production during the Great Depression (1929: 2.654 million t; 1932: 1.068 million t), there was again an increased demand for hard coal and thus an increase in the number of employees during the Nazi regime due to a booming armaments industry. In the west field in 1937 837,405 t and in the east field 1.751 million t coal at the same time. Both fields had three production shafts, the western field from Schönaich 240 m (cable ride; moving in the weather shaft), from Krug 240 m and from Carnall 516 m (cable drive; moving in) the east field Poremba I 390 m (double production), III 260 m (cable drive; moving in Weather shaft) and IV 630 m (cableway; retracting weather shaft). Further day shafts in the Westfeld were Glückauf 191 m (cable journey; entering weather shaft), Georg 245 m (cable journey; entering weather shaft), Wilhelmine 400 m (cable journey; extending) Ruda 230 m (extending weather shaft) and Zabroze 245 m (extending weather shaft), in the Ostfeld Poremba II 390 m (moving in) Hermann 303 m (rope ride; moving in) and Paul 355 m (moving out).

The Second World War itself also led to an increased demand for raw materials, which could only be partially satisfied by increasing working hours and, from 1940, through the use of forced labor and prisoners of war. Despite these coercive measures, production began to decline from 1943, also due to insufficient food supply for the miners.

On January 24, 1945, the city of Zabrze and the mines were occupied by the Soviet army without much fighting. By March 19, many of the miners and other men who remained in Zabrze were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor. Many of them never returned to their homeland. The Luiza mine (meanwhile name for Queen Luise) was able to prevent its workforce from being deported thanks to the intercession of the local communists. For further developments see KWK Zabrze.

CHP Zabrze

After the Queen Luise East and West pits were transferred from the military administration to the Gliwice Union for Coal Industry, the mine was named Zabrze. The east field ( Zabrze Wschód ) had the five shafts Poremba Ia, Ib, II, III and IV with a depth of 320 to 660 m, the Herman shaft (316 m) for the mountain backfill and the Paweł weather shaft (340 m). The excavation took place on three levels in 200 m, 340 m and 400 m depth.

The Westfeld ( Zabrze Zachód ) had four shafts, two of which were built in the nineteenth century (see Queen Luise). The extraction of coal on the 250 m, 500 m and 560 m levels had already been completed, so that new mining levels had to be developed here. Attempts were made to remedy this “wear and tear” during the war by using German prisoners and in the 1950s even women were used as underground workers. In the course of two years, however, the situation normalized and both pits were able to produce 2.21 million tons of coal again in 1947.

In 1956 the 560 m level in the eastern field was opened up and from there the first coal was lifted to the surface. At the end of 1956, the division into West and East Fields was finally abandoned and most of the coal was opened up and mined from the east. Only the eastern (left) production of the Carnall shaft (now referred to as Zabrze II) remained in operation until 1973. In 1960, the so-called Roofmaster was the first fully mechanized longwall face with a length of 220 m. The progress made in this mechanized coal extraction was so great that a world record was set in 1964 with 114,617 tons in 31 days. But not all results were equally successful. The exploration of the 780 m brine turned out to be unsuccessful because the seams of the 600 group showed geological faults and a skip extraction in the Poremba V shaft imported from the Soviet Union turned out to be faulty. That is why this shaft was equipped with a concrete headframe with two four-story hoist baskets and two skip containers for ore mining.

Looking back, it can be seen that the Queen Luise / Zabrze mine was spared major accidents. Although unskilled workers in particular died or were crippled in the 1950s, the only serious accident happened on September 12, 1961, when the cage broke out of the tie rods and fell back into the shaft. At that time, over a dozen miners died. The last coal extracted on Zabrze itself was unearthed on March 31, 1998 on Poremba. After that, most of the shafts were filled and all daytime facilities in the eastern field were completely demolished. Only the Carnall shaft in the Westfeld remained open and is now used as a museum.

Funding figures

Production: 1873: 826,874 t; 1913: 2.32 million t; 1938 Ostfeld: 1.93 million t, Westfeld 772,430 t; 1970: 2.50 million t; 1979: 6.22 million

present

From 1976 to 2000 some of the coal fields still belonging to Zabrze were mined from the Bielszowice mine, so that the mine was now called Zabrze-Bielszowice.

The mining area of ​​the east field has been completely cleared, on that of the west field there is a section of the Guido visitor mine.

swell

  • The text published here on the Queen Luise and Zabrze mines comes from the work “Historia kopalni Zabrze” by Andrzej Dutkiewicz and was published on June 14, 2014 (last accessed October 4, 2015) on the website http://www.zabrze.aplus. pl / zabrze_przemysl_zabrza_kopalnia_zabrze.html found. For the present overview, it has been smoothed and shortened on the basis of a Google translation from Polish into German.
  • Jerzy Jaros. Słownik historyczny kopalń węgla na ziemiach polskich. Katowice 1984.
  • Yearbook for the Upper Mining District Wroclaw. Phoenix Publishing House. Katowice, Breslau, Berlin. 1913. Digitized version at http://www.dbc.wroc.pl/dlibra/publication?id=3349&tab=3 before (last accessed on May 5, 2015)
  • Piotr Greiner. The development of the economy from the 16th to the 20th century . In: Joachim Bahlcke, Dan Gawrecki, Ryszard Kaczmarek (eds.). History of Upper Silesia. Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe. Oldenburg 2015.
  • Bernhard Bull. Johannes Laufer. From Preussag to TUI . Klartext-Verlag. Essen 2005.

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