Voices of Miners Improving the Health and Safety of Miners in Eastern Ukraine VOICES of MINERS

VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE Published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine Kyiv, Ukraine, December 2012 © UNDP, 2012 — All rights reserved All rights reserved. The views expressed in this publication are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations, including UNDP or its Member States. The mention of specific companies does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by UNDP in preference to others of a similar nature. UNDP does not warrant that the information contained in this publication is complete and correct and shall not be liable for any damages incurred as a result of its use. United Nations Development Programme in Ukraine 1 Klovsky Uzviz Kyiv, 01021, Ukraine VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 2. MINERS PAVLO VRONSKYI �� 5 OLEKSII MALANIN. 11 OLENA PROKOPENKO . 13 OLEKSANDR PYSARENKO . 17 MYKOLA IVASHKO. 25 VASYL KHOLOD �� 32 VOLODYMYR PROKHOROV . 36 MARYNA OMELCHENKO. 44 3. WIVES OF MINERS ZOIA IVACHYKOVA. 49 OLEKSANDRA PODOLSKA . 56 LIUDMYLA KARHALEVA-TEMYR. 62 4. MEDICAL WORKERS SVITLANA SHMYHOVA �� 68 IRYNA VLASOVA �� 72 OLEH VATANSKY . 82 YEVHEN SKLIAR, SERHII DEMYDENKO AND OLEKSANDR SUKOLENOV . 90 MINERS 3 VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE INTRODUCTION The “Voices of Miners” is a collection of interviews with miners, miners’ wives, and doctors regarding the health and safety of miners in Krasnodon, Rovenky and Sverdlovsk. This report is part of UNDP’s “Improving the Health and Safety of Miners in Eastern Ukraine” project, which aims to identify and address the health and safety needs of miners. These stories complement the facts and figures provided in a related yet separate “Assessment Report.” Over the past year, UNDP conducted dozens of interviews, focus groups, and community workshops to understand the health and safety needs of miners. UNDP also worked closely with DTEK Rovenkiantratsit, DTEK Sverdlovantratsit, and Metinvest’s Krasnodon Coal to examine the working conditions of miners. In total, UNDP engaged over 650 miners, miners’ spouses, health workers, and government officials to discuss the miners’ needs and priorities. The following interviews were conducted by Mr. Hryhorii Kalashnikov, President of Life Without Barriers and a lifelong resident of Sverdlovsk, under the guidance of UNDP. The reader should note that the names in these interviews have been changed at the request of the interviewees unless otherwise noted. UNDP translated the original interviews from Russian to Ukrainian and English. UNDP translated the interviews with the intent to preserve the spirit of the interviews, not to provide verbatim transcripts. 4 VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE PAVLO VRONSKYI 38 YEARS OLD A STOPE MINER, INJURED AT WORK (The first and last names of the interviewee have been changed.) Please tell us about you and your family. Where are you from? How is your life going in this town? I’m a native of Sverdlovsk and come from a family of miners. Yet I was born in the Far East, where my father was serving in the military. In 1978, after graduating from the Institute of Mining and in accordance with a job placement process, my father moved the family to Sverdlovsk. My father worked at almost all of the mines of Sverdlovantratsit: as a heading driver, mine foreman and even site supervisor. Learning about the toils of miners’ work from my father’s experiences and not through hearsay, I didn’t plan to work in the mines after finishing secondary school. In the 1990s, miners were receiving wages with large delays, sometimes up to one year later. When wages were finally distributed, it was already not worth the same amount of money because of inflation. A MINERS 5 VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE family couldn’t even prepare a “tormozok,” or bag lunch, as there just wasn’t enough money to buy it. Staple products such as lard, sausage, and meat were becoming very expensive. When you work underground, in conditions with insufficient air and intensive physical exertion, the human body experiences stress. That’s why calories are burned very quickly and a worker always feels hungry. And how efficient can you be in the mines when you are hungry? Knowing the situation at the mines, the youth was not eager to work there. The same was with me. I preferred private entrepreneurship. As the border with Russia was close and the prices of goods differed, I was buying goods in the Rostov region and selling them at the market in Sverdlovsk. In parallel, I entered Donbas State Technical University and specialised in “Industrial and Civil Construction.” I graduated in 2003 but never worked in construction. You can see, again, that I didn’t choose to become a miner. In 2004, I married, my wife and I were expecting a baby, and I had sort of come to my senses that family life was a big responsibility after all. By that time, my wife had been working for several years already at the mine, and I also decided to go to work at the mine. Having been trained in the training centre, I started working as a stope miner. The work was hard, but it paid well. Not all of the mines and teams can boast of good wages. I was lucky with that. When our daughter was born, we started thinking about our personal dwelling, as we were living with our parents before. We saved some money by ourselves, received some from our parents, and bought an apartment in the centre of town on the fourth floor. And everything would have gone well if not for a disastrous incident. In 2011, the roof collapsed at my place of work, and I was seriously injured. Everything happened instantaneously, during the second half of the work shift around 18:00. In such cases, it’s very hard to predict and avoid injuries. It’s next to impossible. It all depends how lucky you are. A small piece of rock can fall on you, just marring or scratching you, or it could be a lump of a rock, five-by-five metres. Because of very noisy machines, you cannot, for instance, hear the sounds to predict a fall. Workers signal each other with gestures, as it’s not worth yelling as nobody would be able to hear you. For several minutes, probably because of the shock of the pain, I was unconscious. At that time, I didn’t know how serious the injury was, and only now I can assess whether I was properly 6 VOICES OF MINERS IMPROVING THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF MINERS IN EASTERN UKRAINE evacuated from the mine to the hospital. It takes about one hour and a half to cover the distance from the closest first aid station of the mine to the place where I work. That’s why the workers of my team brought me to the grass: they used a wooden ladder in place of a stretcher. Then, a doctor and mine rescue brigade (MRB) employees arrived on the scene. As soon as I was in the first aid station, they put me on a hand frame. Soon after, they loaded me in the MRB car, which wasn’t suited to transport a person lying on a hand frame. Somehow they managed to put me on the floor between the seats. I was transported to a city hospital in this state. Each hill on the road caused intolerable pain all over my body. I found out later that it was a vertebral fracture and crushed bones. I was brought to the reception ward of the hospital. There we began a long procedure of registration and other formalities before making the first injection or diagnostic examination. The torments continued as I was shifted to a metallic rigid wheelbarrow and transported for an x-ray. When they were placing me on the x-ray table, I could not help but whimper with pain. Fortunately, the director of the mine came to the hospital and insisted on transporting me to the regional clinical hospital in the city of Luhansk. It was Friday, so local doctors would hardly do anything with me until Monday. And it would be useless anyway as they could not do any surgical operations on the spine. If during the first 12 hours after the accident, the spinal medulla is not freed from the compression of damaged spine fragments, the consequences would be irreversible. At about 22:30 I was put into a “GAZelle” type ambulance to be delivered to the Luhansk regional hospital. Again, the whole way, I suffered from the movement of ambulance’s suspension. The pain didn’t go away. In less than one hour after our arrival to the Luhansk hospital, I was lying on the surgical table. The surgery was to be done immediately. My wife had already arrived and was giving her written consent to the doctors to conduct the surgery. I cannot judge how successful the operation was, but the doctors did their best. The financial expenses of the treatment were covered by the administration of the mines and the Social Insurance Fund for Occupational Injuries. Everything that was necessary for my treatment was provided. In two months, I was discharged from the hospital home. I could only lie at that time, and there was no wheelchair yet. I received the wheelchair by the Social Insurance Fund nine months after the injury.

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