Recruitment for the 22nd session of the Sejm of Children and Youth began in February this year. To take part, applicants had to complete a project. The project topic was “Memorial sites – tangible evidence of events of particular importance to local and national identity.” The students decided to describe a plaque commemorating the disaster in Iwiny.
The aim of the project was to select and describe a memorial site that lives in the awareness of local residents and is particularly important to them. The students chose a memorial plaque commemorating the victims of the disaster. It was unveiled in June 2015 and is located in Iwiny, in the park near the Village Community Centre. The plaque lists all the people who died tragically that day.
The main aim of the project was to describe the memorial site and to create an action plan that would increase interest in the disaster, its consequences and the memory of its victims. At the end of the project, the students made a film, without which the work would not have been complete. In the film, they talked about the disaster and their work on the project.
“One of the largest disasters caused by mining activity took place in Iwiny on 13 December 1967, at around 3:15 a.m. The embankment of the settling pond, almost 27 metres high, could not withstand the pressure of the water and waste sludge, and it ruptured. A mixture of 12.3 million m³ of water, sludge and ice created a huge wave that flooded the part of Iwiny adjacent to the settling pond, extending to the valley of the Bobrzyca River, as well as the Bobrzyca valley itself. Areas from Iwiny through Lubków to Tomaszów Bolesławiecki and Kraśnik were submerged. The losses were enormous: not only residential and farm buildings were affected, but animals and crops were also swept away. Above all, 18 people, including children, died, and 570 were injured. Because the tragedy of the families from Iwiny unfolded late at night, the residents of the sleeping village had no chance of being rescued. Witnesses of the flood—as these events are often called—still remember the cries of people shouting, the sounds made by drowning animals, and the noise of flowing sludge and water. Every year on 13 December, the families of the flood victims visit their loved ones at the cemetery in Iwiny, where they are buried. Since June, they have also been able to light a symbolic candle at the memorial plaque in the park.”
Source of the text about the plaque: Jan Paździora, Monografia Zakładów Górniczych "Konrad", 1999.