Pavel Vinkler

* 1962

  • “I certainly do think that a country which is rich in ores is rich herself, can use her riches – obviously, it's a source of raw material. Alas, Czech Republic doesn't have too many sources any more. We can moreless say that the deposits in the Czech Republic are exhausted. (...) You know yourselves that the mining history goes back to the fourteenth century, here in Czech Republic. I think it's worth it, that it is obviously good to use what is there, underground, and use it for the benefit of the country or for some business.” “And now tell me where did all the uranium ore go? What happened with it?” “It is generally known that an international treaty existed, before 1989, between then the Soviet Union and Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, that all the ore would be transported to the Soviet Union. It was used for nuclear missiles and later on, after 1989, it was a commercial activity for the needs of nuclear power plants. Even today, uranium is mined mostly to produce electricity from the nuclear sources.”

  • “Every closing of a mine is a burial of the whole place in a way. I always said, it takes several years to build a chimney or a mine but it takes a while to dynamite, to tear down the headwork, to fill in the shaft. There's the history, the shaft, the mine provided livelihood for several thousands of families and suddenly, it is gone. It's a sad event. One period of life has come to end. In Dolní Rožínky, we know that the deposit is exhausted, there is not going to be any mining any more. So it's a sad thing when the mine and the surface work is torn down. We who have worked there for longer, we feel bad about it. But the deposit ha ssome productive capacity. It depends on actual amount of the ore or world prices or other things and once, it is bound to end. Someone mines for five years, we spent sixty years there.”

  • "Mining is an acquired taste. I think that mining, even though it's dangerous, full of risks and dirty, it is a beautiful work with natural material, when you're in spaces which are million years old, and you're uncovering them. When you drill new mine shafts, you're back in history for some million years. The rock was growing maybe a hundred millions of years before us, or even more. For me, it is a nice job. I managed to work in a mine for thirty four years altogether, first as a managing engineer, then as the head engineer. This is a higher rank, bigger responsibility. You're on the phone seven days a week. I was also the head disaster relief manager. (…) I'd always say to myself, 'What the heck is going on again?' Those were the night phone calls. The mine is working perfectly fine in three shifts and those were the worst phone calls, when the phone rang and there was the dispatcher at the other end of the line. That meant that there was something going on underground. Then, one needs to switch on, wake up and recall what is going on, which shafts are working. This is probably what's, so to say, annoying about this work, when the mine is working on hundred percent, you cannot ever switch off."

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    Brno, 09.11.2019

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Horničina, i když je nebezpečná a špinavá, je krásná práce s přírodou starou miliony let

Pavel Vinkler was born on the 27th March of 1962. He spent his childhood in Dolní Rožínka where his father had moved for work. His father came from a family of farmers that lived near Hlinsko in Bohemia; they had to surrender their estate to the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. He thus accepted a metalworking job in the newly opened uranium mine at the Rozna deposit. Pavel grew up in a region which gained its charakter from mining. After having graduated from secondary school in Bystřice nad Pernštejnem, he went to study at the Technical University in Ostrava. In 1984 he graduated in Deep Mining of Uranium Deposits and found employment in his hometown at the Uranové Doly [Uranium Mines] Horní Rožínka company. From 1986, he worked as a production engineer, his job was to manage driving and transport of the extracted ore. Five years later, he became the head engineer of the mines and the head of the disaster relief service. He spent all his working life at the Rozna I shaft where he was the head engineer. The R1 shaft, on whose excavation his father worked, Pavel closed in 2017 afte sixty years of operation, when he coordinated the sad ceremony of the last cart.