An evaluation of Soma underground coal mine disaster with respect to risk acceptance and risk perception

Résumé

The underground coal mine disaster occurred in Soma-Eynez Mine (SEM), Turkey, is one of the largest coal mine disasters of this Millennium.  A sudden mine fire started in the mine cannot be controlled and resulted in 301 fatalities and approximately 100 injuries. Although the cause of the fire has not been determined yet and there are various hypothesis related to the ignition of the fire, most of the casualties are mainly due to decision-making related problems in various hierarchal levels. Moreover, the decision making related problems in the emergency management have cascading effects and impact on the casualties, which are related to risk acceptance and perception of the mine management. In this paper, the casualties of Soma Mine Disaster (SMD) are analyzed in terms of risk acceptance and risk perception in order to establish related guidelines for better decision-making practice in case of emergencies in underground mines in Turkey. It is found that quite a high degree of risk is accepted to be taken for mine fires by the high level decision makers, which led mine employees to have a false safety perception. This also resulted in almost full ignorance of self-escape, inappropriate use of personal safety equipment and unstructured emergency management which yielded large number of mine staff to wait in the mine during the fire instead of a sharp implementation of the mine evacuation plan.