Prevention of natural hazards
Mining activities KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. are inherently accompanied by natural hazards. The most important of these is the threat posed by the rock mass, which causes mining tremors and their potential consequences in the form of rock falls, roof collapses and cave-ins.
These factors affect employee safety, as their occurrence can lead to serious or even fatal injuries as well as damage to underground machinery, equipment and infrastructure and also production downtimes. For many years, the Company has been undertaking numerous preventive actions in its mines, including systematic seismological observations, ongoing assessment of the rock mass and identification of areas of elevated roof collapse hazard. The Company selects the sizes, shapes and numbers of chambers and intra-chamber pillars, designs the most favourable direction of advancing mine work and the optimum order of extracting ore from deposits to minimise local concentrations of stress in the rock mass.
It also applies “active” methods of preventing uncontrolled roof collapses and rock falls, which involve provoking dynamic events through mass blasting of mining faces and through blasting to release stress in the orebody or its roof. In the case of other natural hazards, there are also numerous technical and organizational initiatives aimed at reducing the risks associated with them.