Langau-Riegersburg open-cast lignite mine
From 1948 to 1963, lignite was mined in Langau in Lower Austria and from 1962 to 1963 in neighboring Riegersburg .
history
discovery
1910 were discovered on the site north of Langau ( district horn ) and Schaffa ( Šafov , Okres Znojmo , South Moravia ) when creating a sand pit for the construction of the station building of the local railway Retz-Drosendorf in Langau on lignite .
Thereupon the postmaster Linsbauer, the innkeeper Köppl and the teacher Wunderl announced the prospecting right. By drilling in the so-called “Schaffinger Feld”, they identified lignite in various places.
In order to enable further investigations and the opening up of the seam , the "Langauer Bergbaugesellschaft" was founded in 1911 as a cooperative with limited liability. This company was run by the director of the Retz advance fund , Georg Pawlas.
About 30 more boreholes under the direction of the teacher Wunderl suggested mining the coal.
First excavation attempt
On May 1, 1912, eight miners who had come with their families from Moravian-Ostrava began to build a shaft. However, this collapsed.
A second shaft reached the second, deeper seam at a depth of 12 meters, but this had to be abandoned because of the large amounts of water that were pouring in.
These and other difficulties had used up the cooperative's capital so that it had to cease operations. The mining rights were sold to the Brüx - Dux coal mining company.
No further mining attempts were made during the First World War .
Second excavation attempt
In autumn 1919, work was resumed. This time from the municipality of Vienna . The Wiener Stadtwerke - Elektrizitätswerke took over the Langau coal basin. A further 22 test wells had been drilled by 1922, but the lignite was not extracted this time either.
Further drilling followed between December 1935 and April 1936, as a result of which the coal reserves were found to be exploitable. However, the construction of an open pit had to be canceled due to recent major water ingress.
As was the case during the First World War, no further attempts at dismantling were made during the Second World War .
post war period
After the Second World War, Austria was cut off from urgently needed coal imports due to a lack of foreign currency. Coal mined domestically was not allowed to leave the respective occupation zones for a long time , which hit Vienna and Lower Austria particularly hard and endangered reconstruction in general.
The severe winter of 1946/1947 exacerbated this crisis. The federal ministries for asset protection and economic planning as well as trade and reconstruction then decided to promote coal production.
For this purpose, the mining promotion company with limited liability was founded with the task of looking after and promoting coal mining operations in Austria within the framework of the Mining Promotion Act 1947, but also to increase production through their own mining companies. These activities were financed by the Marshall Plan and federal funds.
In the meantime, the limited partnership company "Freude aus Wien" acquired the mining rights from the municipality of Vienna and tried in vain in March 1947 to reactivate the drained shaft from 1912 and to begin underground mining.
In the summer of 1947 ownership changed again, this time to Bergbau-Förderungs-Gesellschaft mbH, which began the necessary preparations that same year. 66 new test wells confirmed the results of the previous wells, but they also helped to better delineate the location of the seams.
Dismantling in Langau
In April 1948, the open-pit mining work began after the necessary agricultural land had been replaced by the owners.
In order to get a grip on the large amounts of water that had previously stopped every attempt at extraction, wells were built around the extraction area and the water table was lowered from the beginning of June 1948 . However, this caused the house wells to dry out in parts of Langau. From July 1952, the eastern part of Langau was supplied with water by means of a water pipe from a well from the mining area. However, the water quality left a lot to be desired and so a new well was built. The Bergbau-Betriebs-Gesellschaft contributed financially to the costs.
On June 17, 1948, the actual mining operations in the "Grube Austria" began. By the end of the year, 145,200 m³ of overburden had been removed to expose the coal seam. In November and December of the same year, 1,353 tons of lignite were extracted using only human muscle. Around 15 men lifted 10-20 tons of coal a day with staples and shovels. After the coal had also been shoveled through sieves by hand, it was transported to the Langau train station in horse-drawn vehicles.
A makeshift sifting and loading facility made it possible to begin normal extraction and conveying operations on January 10, 1949, even if coal extraction and the sorting out of coarse coal lumps were still done by hand. Meanwhile, tractors and trucks were used as a means of transport to the train station.
At this time (early 1949) the construction of the coal processing and loading facilities near the Langau train station began. To transport the coal from the mine to this facility, the "Wiener Brückenbau- und Eisenkonstruktions-AG" built a 2,146 meter long cable car system and put it into operation on November 15, 1949. The mechanical systems for the sorting systems were built by the company " Simmering-Graz-Pauker AG" (SGP). Operations started here on November 12, 1949.
On November 28th, the mechanical mining of the lignite began with an electric backhoe . In March 1950, a diesel-powered universal backhoe with a crawler track was added.
In 1949/1950 the general tasks of the "Bergbau-Förderungs-Gesellschaft mbH" were transferred to the "Kohlenholding Gesellschaft mbH". Subsequently, the "Bergbau-Förderungs-Gesellschaft mbH" was converted in 1952 into the "Bergbau-Betriebs-Gesellschaft mbH" with operations in Langau and Neufeld an der Leitha . On September 23, 1960, the board of the "Bergbau-Betriebs-Gesellschaft mbH" was replaced by the board of VOEST .
The removal of the overburden over the coal seams was taken over by the company " Universale Hoch- und Tiefbau AG". The excavation was carried out with a bucket chain excavator and backhoe excavators, and the truck was transported to the high dump about one kilometer away . Around 4,000 m³ of overburden was removed in two shifts. From April 1950 the already emptied parts of the pit were filled up with the overburden so that they could be used again for agriculture after recultivation .
From August 1959 a bucket wheel excavator was used for the excavation work and five mobile belt trucks were used to transport the spoil. This changeover to trackless material transport reduced production costs and accelerated the workflow. But it was also at the expense of the number of employees.
Due to preparatory work for the expansion of the mining area and as a result of sales difficulties, the output fell by a quarter in 1952. In the following years, however, it rose again. In 1954, around 1,000 tons were mined daily in two shifts. During the summer months, work was carried out in one shift due to the lower demand for coal (approx. 500 tons per day). The production record was achieved in 1956 with an annual production of 255,044 tons.
Despite extraction rates of up to 1,200 tons per day during the winter months, coal production fell from 1957. The fact that the Linz smelter purchased part of the Langau lignite for its own power station caused the annual output to increase again in 1961, but did nothing to change the downward trend.
At the beginning of the 1960s , the calorific value of the coal mined in the northern mining area began to decline more and more and could only be increased to the necessary level by mixing it with coal from the northeast field. On March 29, 1963, however, the northeast field was exhausted and the calorific value required by the Simmering power plant in Vienna, the main consumer of Langau lignite, could no longer be achieved.
At that time, oil and gas became serious alternatives and the large hydroelectric plants made energy producers less dependent on coal-fired caloric power plants.
On July 31, 1963, operations in Langau were closed.
Dismantling in Riegersburg
In 1952, lignite was also discovered in the municipality of neighboring Riegersburg in the Waldviertel ( Hollabrunn district ) and the location and extent were determined more precisely through further drilling.
On November 5, 1962, preparations for coal mining in Riegersburg began. With the cessation of the production operation in Langau at the end of July 1963, the production started in the much smaller mining area in Riegersburg on July 29, 1963. The mined coal was transported to the screening plant at Langau train station with five trucks.
After only five months of extraction, the mining operations in Riegersburg were closed on December 15, 1963 and the mining operations were liquidated. Most of the factory barracks were sold and demolished. Most of the workers found work at Wiener Brückenbau and Eisenkonstruktions AG or in agriculture. At the end of June 1964, the liquidation was completed.
present
In 1981, OMV AG , Graz-Köflacher Eisenbahn- und Bergbaugesellschaft and Minerex Mineral-Explorationsgesellschaft mbH carried out a coal exploration with around 50 boreholes and geophysical investigations in the Langau-Riegersburg- Geras area. In addition to known deposits between Riegersburg and Weitersfeld , brown coal deposits were found on the outskirts of Langau and between Langau and Kottaun.
Drilling in the immediate vicinity of the state border in 1982 confirmed the assumption that the coal deposits continue to Safov (Schaffa) in South Moravia.
However, the stocks found were too small for economic extraction and so no further investigations were carried out.
Part of the open pit was not refilled and so the pit filled with water. The “mining lake”, as it is called, now serves as a leisure center. In 1989 the municipality of Langau set up a buffet, a lawn for sunbathing and a children's playground, and since 1999 there has even been a championship water-skiing area. The Euro-SOLA association operates a youth summer camp. There is also a campsite. A little off the beaten track is a shooting range.
literature
- Reinhard Roetzel: The lignite mining of Langau. In: Andreas Johannes Brandtner (Ed.): Langau in the Waldviertel. Verlag Arca JiMfa, Třebíc 1994, pp. 299–319, 26 fig., 2 tab.
- Reinhard Roetzel: From coal sump to leisure paradise. The history of the lignite mining Langau-Riegersburg. In: The Waldviertel. NF Vol. 53, No. 4, 2004, ISSN 0259-8957 , pp. 341-362, 14 figs.
- Federal Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction - Supreme Mining Authority: The Austrian Mining 1945–1955. Self-published by the Federal Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction - Supreme Mining Authority, Vienna 1955.
Coordinates: 48 ° 50 ′ 38.6 " N , 15 ° 43 ′ 43.7" E