Students:Wednesday, Day Five
An early breakfast (earlier than the kitchen staff anticipated) and then off to Most by hired bus at 8.15 to be dropped off at the offices of Czech Coal. Everyone signed a disclaimer without knowing what it contained and then herded onto the coal company's all-terrain Unimog for a tour, or 'safari' of the coal mines with company guide Mr. Gertner.
Summer School coordinator Andrew Barton rode shotgun with the driver, who talked of the need to bulldoze Horní Jiřetín and Černice in order to keep jobs going in the region (and according to whom 57 % of Horní Jiřetín residents are in favour of expanding the mining limits).
The first stop was the reclamation work at the Most hippodrome that had been designed according to French advice, including putting down a thick layer of shingle for drainage purposes, and an underground and overground irrigation system, a long home straight of 1 200 m for horse sprints, very wide curves, a slope of 12 m from start to finish, horse stabling for up to 200 horses, and training grounds in the shape of a four-leaf clover with much sharper curves. And all built on reclaimed mining land, the process and cost of which interested the students the most. A nearby golf course also built of reclaimed land is not provided as financially successful as the race track, however, as it doesn't benefit from being owned by Czech Coal stakeholders.
Mr. Gertner then provided a tour of the various levels of the Czechoslovak Army Mine, including explainations of the amount of coal mined on a daily and yearly basis, the area covered by the mine, the dangers involved in mining due to the deep mining activity that preceded open cast mining, and explanations of workings of wheel-bucket excavators. Some mufflons, or mountain goats, were also spotted at the mine running under the conveyor belts. This was followed lastly by a stop-off at the new Lake Most, which pan Gertner said should be accessible to the public within three years after rising another 95 cm. He also described what the area should look like after completion, which will involve an arbortoreum from the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to the lake, an open air mineral and fossil museum, and a scale model of the old city of Most.
Pan Gertner also revealed that the wooden Romanian Orthodox church built beside the Assumption of the Virgin Mary had been built with Romanian funding in honour of the Romanian orthodox community that lived in the Most region before the war and had been constructed in Romanian before being dismantled and moved to Most, hence Most can boast that it has two relocated churches, one beside the other.
After a quick lunch of baguettes it was time to meet Czech Coal's PR team of messers Benešová and Novotná (the latter was featured in the film Ženy SHR or in English 'Coal in the Soul'). Students got so absorbed in the discussion that took place with them that it took up all the alloted time until the arrival of the bus, leaving no free time as originally scheduled.
Back in HSK, the final event of the day was an address by Karel Beránek on regional planning in the Ústí region.