Tragedy has returned to the mines of Súria. The death of three miners this Thursday due to a landslide in one of the mine galleries has a very immediate precedent in time – just over 10 years – and also bears an enormous resemblance. Two people died on December 6, 2013 while doing maintenance on an extraction machine.
As reported by the company Iberpotash -today ICL Iberia- at the time, the accident occurred around four in the morning when the two workers were buried by the landslide.
The two workers who died then were Joan Ramon Mitjans, 49, and Isaac Closa, 37. Both were residents of the town of Súria. The two workers were with other colleagues in an area of ??the ore extraction front doing repair and maintenance tasks on the machine at the Cabanasses de Súria mine. The detachment of the roof of the mining gallery caused the fall of a rock of between 4 and 5 meters that was fatal for both men.
Like today, the event shocked the town. The Súria and Sallent mines ceased their activity immediately. The other miners who were at the scene were unharmed in the accident.
More recently, but not in Súria, but in the nearby town of Balsareny, there were also two occupational accidents with disastrous consequences in a mine due to a falling stone. It was in 2020 and in this case a 55-year-old worker from the Iberpotash de Vilafruns mine died.
The accident occurred at around 11:35 a.m. when a stone fell on the man, a resident of Puig-reig (Barcelona), while he was working inside the mine. Subsequently, there was another fatality due to another accident. Both cases happened in less than a month.
The Sallent factory of the Iberpotash company was the tragic scene of another fatal accident in 2009 for which workers and unions criticized the company’s lack of safety measures. A 25-year-old operator, Jesús Aranda Ramírez, was trapped in the potash conveyor belt. His body was found this morning by his colleagues inside a factory hopper.
These cases, at the time, brought to the surface the social conflict between unions and the company —which has managed the potash mines of Sallent, Súria and Balsareny since 1998—, as the former demanded greater security. In addition, the mines are in the crosshairs of numerous environmental groups that have been denouncing salt spills for decades.
