Hwange (Zimbabwe)
Coordinates: 18 ° 22 ′ S , 26 ° 30 ′ E
Hwange , to 1982 Wankie , is a city in Matabeleland North Province in Zimbabwe .
geography
Hwange has 37,522 inhabitants (2012 census) and is located on the Bulawayo – Victoria Falls road and rail line . The city is unadorned, but also lives indirectly from tourism, as the 14,000 km² Hwange National Park is in the immediate vicinity south of the city and the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi and the Kariba reservoir are around 70 km away .
History and economy
Hwange was founded in 1903 and named after the traditional head of the village, Whanga.
Hwange has been a coal mining area since 1901, the most important seams and the largest coal mine in Zimbabwe can be found here. Each year, 80 percent of the coal is mined in open-cast mining at 5.8 million tonnes. 40 percent of the funding is state-owned and 32 percent is owned by British wealth management company Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Virtually all of the coal is transported away by rail. The transfer station between the coal railway and the state railway is Thomson Junction . For decades, Hwange has kept the National Railways of Zimbabwe under steam. There is the Hwange electricity company. The coal is also used for steel processing. Otherwise, the clay deposits are used to manufacture bricks.
On June 6, 1972, a methane gas explosion occurred in the entire area of Wankie 2 mine, which triggered several coal dust explosions. The entire mining area of the pit was recorded. Several weather and extraction shafts were destroyed, as well as above-ground systems. Despite intensive rescue attempts, the consequences were devastating. There were no survivors underground. This underground disaster, one of the worst worldwide, which went down in mining history as the Wankie coal mine disaster , claimed 427 deaths. Wankie 2 was completely closed. Today there is a memorial at the site of the above-ground mine.
One of Hwange's problems is the informal settlement of disused extraction areas of 40 km². One of them now even has a hospital, school, residential buildings and a church. The groundwater rises and there is a lack of information as to why the mining areas have been closed: because of the water or because of depletion of the deposits. In the meantime, 14 million cubic meters of water have accumulated, some of which escapes through old boreholes. It is very acidic (pH 2.4) and contains dissolved salts.
Web links
- Hwange Colliery (English)
- Images of coal mining in Hwange (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Four Days In June by GJ Livingstone-Blevins (PDF; 2.1 MB) - Course of the accident with pre- and post-history (English text)
- ↑ List of Casualties (PDF; 802 kB) - List of the 427 victims of the mine accident (English)