2024-03-22 15:44:43
Miners in the Ruhr area have worked underground for well over 100 years. Now a new exhibition in the Zollverein mine in Essen is reminiscent of their hard everyday life.
Essen.
The mining hammer with which miners once had to hew coal out of the rock for eight hours weighs more than 16 kilograms – original tools like this are intended to give visitors to the Zollverein colliery in Essen an authentic impression of the hard work underground.
The permanent exhibition “Underground World” will be officially opened with a ceremony this Sunday at what was once the world’s largest colliery. This will fulfill an urgent wish of the numerous visitors to the above-ground colliery facilities, said the head of the German hard coal company RAG, Peter Schrimpf, at the presentation on Friday. Under the motto “Underground World”, the exhibition shows with many photos, films, sound recordings and original tools how hard the work was when mining coal at a depth of more than 1000 meters.
More than 1,000 people work in the Ruhr mining industry
The Essen coal mine, which closed in 1986, employed over 8,000 people at its peak. Since the end of German hard coal mining in 2018, the underground route has been closed, said the head of the Ruhr Museum, Prof. Theodor Grütter. More than 160,000 visitors come to the Zollverein mine every year to look at the above-ground facilities and the neighboring coking plant in Essen. Many asked about everyday working life underground. There is now an additional offer for them.
The exhibition begins with a greatly enlarged historical photograph of mining on a coal seam that is only about one meter thick. The miners had to work in tight quarters and were hardly protected. In the early days, accidents caused by falling rocks were always a threat, said Grütter. In total, more than 1,000 people lost their lives in Ruhr mining.
The exhibition therefore also shows safety precautions and rescue equipment such as the legendary “Dahlbusch bomb”, a torpedo-shaped rescue capsule for buried miners that is only 38.5 centimeters wide. A modernized version of the capsule, named after a mine in Gelsenkirchen, saved numerous miners from a mining accident in Chile in 2010.
The miners contributed to the prosperity
In the recent past, the German coal mining industry has optimized occupational safety, said Schrimpf. By the end of 2018, the “black gold” had long since been mined by hand, but rather with planes on heavy chains and under the protection of large metal shields, as can be seen in the films.
The exhibition shows that buddies came from far away early on – from Lower Saxony and East Prussia, from Portugal, Turkey and South Korea. At times forced laborers also had to work underground. Day-to-day work involved long journeys underground – the Zollverein colliery alone recently had around 120 kilometers of underground route network – which were covered on foot, with overhead railways or as a human passenger on conveyor belts.
The miners’ work contributed to Europe’s prosperity for over a hundred years, said Grütter. But the negative side effects can also be seen: As a result of coal and rock mining, huge amounts of mine water still have to be pumped out to prevent parts of the Ruhr area from sinking. According to Schrimpf, around 250 million euros are incurred every year in Germany for these so-called perpetual burdens. (dpa)
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