On the evening of April 23, we drilled about 20 holes in several water pipes over a length of almost 500 meters in the Jänschwalde open pit mine.
In order to mine coal in opencast mines, the groundwater level has to be lowered. To do this, large quantities of water are pumped to the surface and discharged. In Jänschwalde, this amounts to 114 billion liters a year. The water pipes we have drilled into are used to divert the water. That’s why we’ve given LEAG the choice of either shutting down all pumps until the pipes are repaired or allowing large quantities of water to flow back into nature. We know that actions like this can’t stop open pit mining forever, but we hope that the extremely high costs will eventually make it impossible to continue operations if we only disrupt them often enough.
Burning lignite destroys the entire ecosystem and our livelihood.
What’s more, it’s not even legal: LEAG is pumping out much more water in Jänschwalde than is legally allowed, which is why it has to shut down the open pit mine on May 15.
Nevertheless, LEAG has announced that it will pump 500 billion liters more in the future. It is completely absurd that there are no consequences for this. So we draw the consequences ourselves with our action.
Most of the mining laws date back to the Nazi era and are very pro-corporate, but they don’t even manage to comply with them.
When corporations break the law, as in this case, there is a lengthy court process led by environmental NGOs, and eventually they have to stop what they are doing, but those responsible for the damage are not punished, and the corporations still get tons of money from the state as if nothing had happened.
In our opinion, this shows that the rule of law cannot even keep its own promises (which are not that convincing in the first place) and that justice must be fought for from below.
After the mine is closed, it will not be restarted. This is a promise. It’s clear that our group can’t do it alone, so we’ll tell you how.
The water pipes run parallel to the edge of the mine for several kilometers. There are cameras and security patrols in some places, but it is not possible to monitor the entire length of the pipes. So pick a quiet area, grab a cordless drill and get to work! The pipes are made of HDPE and have a diameter of about 1 m and a wall thickness of about 3 cm. It is very easy to drill through with a metal or wood drill bit. We used a 10mm drill and took about 10 seconds per hole.
Water will splash out of the hole, and that’s not the best treatment for your cordless drill, so we recommend using protection between the tube and the drill, like in the picture below.
The pipes are under some pressure, not enough to hurt you, but enough to get pretty wet. If you drill above the center, you’ll create a fountain several feet high, which is very pretty, but probably won’t go unnoticed either.
Tips on how to proceed without getting caught and other useful information can be found at:
All open pit coal mines use way too much water. We can’t sabotage them all, so get involved!
We welcome the fact that climate activists have recently moved to direct action. However, we think that the term “peaceful sabotage” is not a helpful category for the discussion. We see ourselves as a movement with everyone fighting for climate justice from below.
Machine-assisted translation of the following German-language post from the Deutschland Indymedia website: https://de.indymedia.org/node/186053
Translation originally posted at øbin.net