About Project

Proper management of the coal mine liquidation process is essential for ensuring the safety of land use. This safety includes both the health and life of residents and the conduct of business activities and the use of areas degraded by mining activities. The SIRIMA project focuses on increasing knowledge and experience related to the threats of post-mining areas in EU Member States especially related to uncontrolled movements of the earth’s surface.

These movements, apart from subsidence related to the conducted mining or movements resulting from the impact of mining tremors, can also take the form of uplifts caused by the lifting of the groundwater table in the rock mass and sudden, discontinuous deformations of the ground surface, i.e. sinkholes.

When sinkholes appear in urbanized areas of coal regions, they pose a real threat to buildings, technical infrastructure, roads and other utility facilities (Article 6). They can also pose a threat to human health and life, but most often, they cause strong anxiety, stress (Article 5) and indicate a lack of control by local government bodies over the managed areas.

The main objectives of the project are:

  • The creation of an European database of sinkhole and the analysis of the conditions of the occurrence of the sinkhole to better manage the hazard in the future by the coal region in transition.
  • Study the impact of mine flooding on surface instability.
  • Identification of sinkhole hazards and risks related to shallow coal mine works.
  • Developing a machine learning model to help the different post-mining actors to better predict the sinkhole hazard, this new tool is very useful for the hazard with limited data and information.
  • Proposing an operation monitoring tool, integrating the communication of the hazard to public and decision makers.
  • Developing an operational guideline for the mining authorities, stakeholders, etc. The objective of the guideline is to better integrate the sinkhole hazards in the risk management and the sustainable development of the coal region in transition.

Based on the objectives listed above, the project team has the ablation to improve the policy maker related to the post-mining hazard by developing policy recommendations, increasing the European knowledge, improved the communication with civic society.

As part of the project, 6 Work Packages are planned, which organize the work on subsequent aspects of the hazard of formation of the sinkholes.

Fig. Graphical presentation of the SIRIMA project workflow.

SIRIMA is research project co-funded by the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS):
GRANT AGREEMENT NO. 101157400 – RFCS-2023
Start time: 01.07.2024
Duration: 3.0 years

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