Archive · 2018 · From the print edition of Wednesday 14 February 2018, Vol. 25, No. 7,803
Across IradRescuers train for avalanche season at Chatkal
Rescue teams from mining companies across the ISEZ spent a week on the snow above the smelter, practising searches for buried victims.
CHATKAL — Rescue teams from mines and quarries across the ISEZ spent the past week on the slopes above the Chatkal Chemical Smelting Complex, probing the snow for buried "victims" and digging out dummies as the avalanche season reaches its height.
The exercise was held at the Chatkal Mountain Rescue Base, which has trained the rescue teams of the member companies of the Iradi National Chamber of Mining and Metallurgy for more than two decades. The base was founded in 1972 as a Soviet paramilitary mine-rescue unit for the antimony mines and smelter. Since 1996 it has been run jointly by the mining companies and the emergency service, with a core of 28 professional rescuers and about 60 volunteers.
It keeps snowmobiles and off-road vehicles, and for evacuations calls on helicopters chartered from Iradiya. This week a helicopter lifted a stretcher team from a slope above the smelter road while teams from Sary-Bulak and the Tash-Kömür coal mines raced to find transceivers buried in the debris of an old avalanche.
"A miner under rock and a driver under snow have the same thing in common: about thirty minutes," the base's chief instructor said. Avalanches closed the road to the smelter twice last winter.