Title: What Has Changed in the Turkish Coal Mining Industry Five Years After the Soma Mine Disaster?
The Soma Mine Disaster (SMD) was the most massive mine disaster of the twenty-first century, with 301 fatalities. This was due to a mine fire in an underground coal mine. Although mine fires usually do not cause a large number of casualties in comparison with other explosions in underground coal mines, the SMD has an anomaly. The cause of the mine fire has not been precisely determined, though various groups of experts developed several hypotheses. Most of the fatalities were due to an inadequate safety culture, unstructured organizational and human performance, and improper decision-making and risk perception during the emergency management. So far, only minimal steps have been taken to improve the safety standards of the coal mines. Larger improvements are necessary to address the variety of factors that contributed to the disaster.
Since 2009, there has been a dramatic increase in casualty statistics in coal mine accidents. Before the SMD, several NGOs and government organizations published reports about health and safety concerns, unsafe mining operations, and related recommendations for the mining sector in Turkey. The indicated safety problems for the coal mining in all of these reports included ventilation problems, ignorance of safety measures due to the pressures of increased production, the subcontracting of mining operations, insufficient personal safety equipment, auditing problems, inefficient inspection processes, the lack of actual integration of risk assessment and management, the lack of consideration of lessons learned from the past accidents, insufficient precautions for methane explosion, inadequate mine monitoring systems, inadequate escape routes, unsatisfactory support systems, problems related to search and rescue, inadequate safety culture, and inadequate training of the miners.
All of the factors indicated in these reports hold true for the SMD. Before the SMD, Turkey had a legislative environment for promoting the development of the mining industry. This led to an excessive number of amendments in the mining and occupational health and safety (OHS) laws, which weakened the overall nature of the laws and decreased the complementary nature of these laws in enforcing safety. Additionally, the amendments were not sufficiently supported by well-established standards, protocols, and guidelines in the implementation. The amendments were made each time a safety concern emerged rather than considering an overall safety framework.
During the process of law amendments, concerns of various stakeholders invested in safety issues were overshadowed by the large presence of small mining companies and the lobbying tactics in play. They were trying to block safety measures that increased the cost of operational activities or required additional investment. This led to a tolerance of high-risk levels in every level of the mining operation, from mine design to operation. Even a false risk perception was developed for the mining operations in this legislative ecosystem. Institutions representing societal checks and balances, such as labor unions, had also lost their role due to political changes. The mine management was recruiting labor through local human resources traders (dayisbasi), and the workforce in the mine was managed by these traders. Although this fact was known by the labor unions, it was ignored. The main reason for this was the lack of real democracy and bottom-up organization, which allowed for employers to manipulate the labor union leader selection process. Moreover, the so-called “yellow unions”—unions under the direct influence of employers—were very strong in the mine, and signed weak collective agreements that fall short of meeting worker demands. This degraded the bargaining power of independent unions; therefore, the labor unions were not effective in ensuring a safe working environment for the mine workers.
This social and legislative framework enabled mining companies to adopt operations of low financial risk, like continued production with a large number of miners within an unsafe mine design, instead of fully mechanized mine operations. Dividing large coal reserves into smaller parts and subcontracting each part to several mining companies also did not allow the companies to have feasible investments to mechanize mines. In the case of the SMD, the mining company tried to achieve a high-level coal production by employing large number of workforce in the underground (approximately 800 workers per shift), with false risk perception. The company totally omitted the high probability hazards like that of a mine fire in a coal mine. It also did not provide effective emergency management training and implementation with the miners and increased the production without making necessary technical improvements in the major mining systems like ventilation, transportation, monitoring, and so on. All these factors and flaws resulted in extremely ineffective decisions made during the emergency management, which elevated the number of fatalities.
There have been several changes made in the laws of mining and OHS to enforce the safety and working conditions of miners. Moreover, almost one year after the SMD, the Turkish government ratified the Safety and Health in Mines Convention, 1995 (No. 176) and the Safety and Health in Construction Convention, 1988 (No. 167) of the International Labor Office (ILO). These two conventions aim at improving the workers’ health and safety in the mining and construction sectors.
The court case for the SMD took four years, and in 2018, the court sentenced five mining executives to up to twenty-two years in jail. Soma Holding’s general manager and technical manager were jailed for twenty-two years in prison. Two other company officials were jailed for nearly nineteen years, and the chairman was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The court sentenced nine other employees to shorter jail terms and acquitted thirty-seven of the fifty-one defendants who faced charges ranging from “killing with probable intent” to “criminally negligent manslaughter.”
As analyzed by Leveson and me, not only were there technical issues related to the operational aspects of mining in the SMD, but there was also a large number of weaknesses and flaws in the hierarchical safety control structure for enforcing safety in the Turkish mining industry that played a critical role. This has also been well-recognized by the public. For this reason, the verdicts created public outrage due to the fact that none of the bureaucrats and technocrats from the hierarchical safety control structure for enforcing safety in the Turkish mining industry were tried. Starting from top, The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM); the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MLSS); the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources (MENR), with its directorate, the General Directorate of Mining Affairs (MIGEM); and Turkish Coal Enterprises (TKI), Labor Unions and the Mining Company constitute the hierarchical safety control structure and share responsibility for enforcing safety in the mines in Turkey. While TBMM establishes the mining and labor laws to ensure sustainable resource exploitation and safe and healthy working environment, MLSS, MENR MIGEM, and TKI are responsible for enforcing the safety by auditing and approving mine design and operations. Labor unions are supposed to check if the procedures for ensuring the health and safety of the mineworkers are adequate and implement necessary actions for improvement.
The new operational framework developed by the legislation and socio-technical controls after the SMD slightly improved the working conditions in the mines. Unfortunately, after the SMD, a conventional event-based approach was followed, which only focused on the causes of the mine fire. This resulted in eclectic improvements in the working conditions of the mines. However, the flaws and the weaknesses in the overall socio-technical system have not remediated themselves fully. For this reason, new amendments made in the legislation following the disaster have not caused a significant improvement in the safety conditions in the current coal mines. Improvements carried out based on some general assumptions without examining the reasons for the casualties in the SMD have not made significant impact on eliminating the flaws in the hierarchical safety control structure. Although there has been several projects funded by European Union on improving the workplace safety in Turkey after the SMD, they overlook the flaws in the overall safety control structure. To this day, high-risk mine production in Turkey continues with only slightly improved working conditions.
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Dr. H. Sebnem Düzgün, is Professor and Fred Banfield Distinguished Endowed Chair in Mining Engineering at Colorado School of Mines (CSM). She also has double appointment in Computer Science at CSM. She has been over 20 years of experience in research and teaching in mining en-gineering on risk and safety analysis for underground and surface mines, mine environmental monitoring using remote sensing, and information technologies for mining systems, including big data analytics and AI.