A Czech Land Surveyor in Lapland

Text: Lasse Kristensen, Praha
Photographs: Linda Antalová, Praha

”Malmö has been glued to Copenhagen by the Öresund bridge”, explains Marek Přikryl sitting in the Letná park overlooking the hundred towers of Prague and the river Vltava with its turn-of-the-century bridges. Marek is a true Praguer. Although he was born in Kroměříž he has lived in the city since he was ten. But it is elsewhere that he makes his living:

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”Malmö was perfect. I liked the view, the sea, and Copenhagen. We often went to Copenhagen with friends from work.”

In Malmö, Marek was involved in the construction of ”Turning Torso”. The building of Scandinavia´s highest apartment skyscraper was not only an impressive piece of engineering, but also a demonstration of Sweden’s political will to compete for the country’s position in the world economy. One crucial factor in this competition is the supply of professional skills:

”The Turning Torso was a big construction site. There were many people from all over the world, sometimes we would have to communicate in English.

The Turning Torso was completed in 2005. Like other international specialists involved in the construction, land surveyor Marek had to look for another assignment. This brought him to the town of Kiruna, more than a thousand kilometers north of Malmö and some 150 km north of the Polar Circle.

In Kiruna

In Kiruna everything revolves around the activities at the giant iron ore mine underneath the town. In early 2006, the state-owned mining company LKAB decided to construct a new refining and pelletising plant. This single largest investment in the history of Sweden has attracted many workers from other parts of Sweden to this strangely optimistic and well-organised town in the middle of Lapland’s wilderness.

At the moment, Marek works on the construction of a tunnel that is to house a large conveyor belt. After completion, 29 million tons of tiny iron pellets will be carried each year from the new plant through the tunnel directly into railcars. The railcars’ destination is the ice-free harbour in Narvik. From Narvik, it is 350 000 ton vessels that feed the world market’s growing hunger for iron.

”You are too good to do tunnels, my boss tells me,” Marek proudly states. ”But for me it is a new experience. Yet I could never work in the mines my whole life. It is dark, wet and noisy.” There is a heavy smell of ammonia in the tunnel, and the ground is bumpy with mud and cement. It is not warmer than 8-10 ° C. Marek says that the worst is not the cold, but the change of temperature: “I have to wear a lot of clothes and then climbing around, measuring and marking, it makes you sweaty.”

Marek is marking x-spots and numbers at the end of the tunnel with a white spray-can. They inform the operators of the drilling machines where to prepare the next blast. The drilling machine is waiting just behind Marek until he marks the final numbers on the monstrous rock wall: ”It’s important that the machines do not have to wait for me, they are the most expensive at the site. Sometimes they are really breathing down my neck. But you get used to that. You can get used to everything.” As he speaks, it actually feels as if the specialised machine is breathing while exhausting liquids and gasses into the tunnel.

!/wie/cms/images/279.jpg!After each blast waste rock is taken out, a layer of cement is sprayed on the side walls, and security bolts are fixed to the ceiling. Only after this, ventilation and electricity is brought in. Where Marek works it is completely dark. The only source of illumination Marek has is the spotlight on his helmet. Yet, in the dark it is easy to see the laser and the prisms from his equipment. ”I have never built a tunnel before,” Marek says, and with self-irony he adds: ”I just have to hope that the ends will meet.”

Land of Opportunities

Marek Přikryl is 33 years old. He holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University in Prague in the field of land surveying. While there has been a strong tradition of educating skilled land surveyors in the Czech Republic, Sweden lacks people with that particular profession. Especially now, with a boom in the Swedish construction industry taking place, land surveyors are in high demand.

Marek’s discovery of his land of opportunities all started by coincidence. He met a Swedish girl and fell in love. During their years of study both of them used every opportunity to stay in each other’s countries. This was still before the Czech Republic joined the European Union and there was funding for a whole series of exchange programmes. ”I didn’t choose Sweden”, says Marek, ”I don’t have any special feelings for this country, it just happened this way.” Although the relationship between him and his former girlfriend ended, Marek had become familiar with the country and its language.

Since 2003 Marek has been working mostly in Sweden. In that year he decided to choose a new path and quit his job at the university in Prague: ”My mentor finally told me. Marek, all you do, you are doing it only for yourself. It took me five years of extra studies in a Ph.D. programme to understand that little sentence.”

So Marek decided that if all he was doing, he was doing only for himself, then he would not stay in the academic micro-world but rather become rich and successful. He set up a web portal for land surveyors and started his own company in the Czech Republic. Soon he used his friendly face to get in contact with partners in Sweden. He got a foot in the door of the newly established Swedish company, Mätcenter; a company that was soon to employ more than eighty land surveyors.

In the case of Kiruna, Mätcenter’s client is not directly LKAB but Sweden’s second-largest construction company NCC. Marek, on his side, is again sub-sub-contracting since he has everything registered with his company in the Czech Republic.

For three years Marek has been doing different jobs for Mätcenter. Marek shows five fingers, representing his activities: “I stopped with the research and the teaching at the university but I still keep the contacts,” he says and moves away two of his fingers. Currently, he spends about ninety percent of his working time in Sweden: “Then there is my business in Prague, that’s 10 %. I try to keep that to a minimum because it’s less well paid then in Sweden but it’s necessary to keep good contacts there as well and if Mätcenter goes down, I still have my activity in the Czech Republic. Then there is the management time. Actually, I don’t separate the activities in the Czech Republic and Sweden. It is one work, one activity.”

Marek drives us in his company car from the tunnel back to his office: “It’s beautiful with the industry and the snow-covered mountains behind it. I get a kick out of this view every day that I am here.” We arrive at the office. On the second floor in a row of container houses right next to the construction site he talks with his colleagues. Later he comments: ”It’s important to talk to people, especially the team leader and the driller. To communicate. Even though there is no special news, it’s always good to know what is going on.”

Marek’s Swedish is fluent. However, in the beginning he experienced difficulties while working underground: “There were a lot of new words, a lot of slang. I was writing it down, even phonetically, and looked it up at home. But you shouldn’t ask too many questions, then people will not trust you.”

Lunch time. All restaurants turn into buffets at this time of the day. Prices are the same everywhere. Unlike the LKAB miners the guys from Mätcenter always eat out in the city: ”It’s important to eat good. We always go to Hotel City. They have the best food.”

After lunch, Marek, his boss Clem and a colleague drive the five kilometres past the railroad along the shore of the lake that has recently been dried to proceed with the extraction of the iron body from underneath it. Passing the entrance to the world’s largest underground iron mine Clem turns his head from the steering wheel of Mätcenter’s Mercedes and points to the Luossavaara mountain at the other side of town. Here mining was discontinued during the world crisis in the 1980s. Marek’s boss optimistically believes that the iron ore extends all the way underneath the town of Kiruna, connecting the two mountains. If that is true, the whole of Kiruna has to be moved to the safe side of the mountains during the following century’s exploitation of the underground. With the world demand for iron growing, the optimism in Kiruna seems to have no limits.

When Marek arrived in Kiruna this Monday evening it was only for the seventh time. As usual, he was picked up by his colleague at the airport. They talked about what was new at work. Later in the evening, Marek took his colleague back to the airport. They would not see each other till next week. Marek took over the room in the flat provided by Mätcenter. Their sparsely furnished and quiet 3-room flat is in a village adjacent to Kiruna and conveniently close to the tiny airport.

Like most others at the site Marek has twelve-hour working days when he is in Kiruna. Marek and his seven colleagues all work shifts of seven days. After seven days in Kiruna, he has seven days off. While most of his colleagues travel to their home towns further South in Sweden, Marek is off to Prague. The travel time is almost similar. Marek’s colleague Johan is going on from Stockholm airport by car to Örebro. If connections are good, Marek will be at home in his flat in the centre of Prague exactly the same time as Johan in his flat in Örebro. Mätcenter pays for all flights within Sweden. But Marek usually connects to a plane from Stockholm to Prague at his own expense. ”One lives in Stockholm, one lives in Örebro, I live in Prague, it’s not so different.”

We get out of the car in front of LKAB’s administration building. Marek has never set a foot inside the tall and monotonous office building where we meet the head of the miners’ union. Accident insurances and proper working conditions for the miners are the union’s main concerns. For the young professionals from Mätcenter this kind of solidarity seems both outdated and far too time-consuming.

The Future of Land Surveying?

Later, back in the car, Marek admits that he understands that people can get bored around here:

“There is nothing. But in a way that is what you expect, so that’s perfect, it fits. You can get more bored in more exciting places because you expect something more.”

Nevertheless, from time to time Marek feels it is a gypsy life. ”I am here for work,” Marek says:

”This is not my whole life, this is not what fills me. If I was here for months I could write you a whole list of things that I miss in Kiruna. But I don’t have to, I am only here for a week and then I go home and switch to doing work with my head – the management work for my company.”

Despite of this weekly switch between the office and the mine, working in the tunnel would not be challenging enough for Marek on the long run. It is a new experience but for Marek it is definitely not the future: ”It’s a butcher’s work”, he says referring to the simple, however, tough routine of spraying marks on the rocks one to three times a day. ”If I had to do the work I am doing here all the time, I wouldn’t be satisfied.”

Marek does not know for how long there will be work for him to do in Kiruna. The whole plant will be finished by 2008. But for now it suits him. Yet in his head he is already occupied with future projects. At the end of this week’s shift, he will not return directly to Prague but attend a conference on machine control in Stockholm. One more opportunity for him to enlarge his strong network of partners.

Some weeks later, we meet Marek at the Technical University in Prague. He is waiting for us in front of the machinery faculty with his small rucksack. In the afternoon he is off to work again but now he wants to show us his toy – his new business idea. Friends from the university have built an airship. With its 9 meters it is only a model but the Ph.D. students are applying for a grant to experiment with a larger version that will be able to carry the necessary equipment for making images from low altitudes. Together with 3D laser scan solutions the airship should be used as a new way of land surveying. If Marek and his business partners succeed in signing the contract with Mätcenter for a Czech branch of the company, they will invest all their money in the Zeppeliner project.

“It is flexible, it is cheap but it also has to be very accurate. We don’t know yet if it is going to work, but we have to try it,” says Marek while carefully escorting the white helium-filled invention out of the workshop to the lawn behind the faculty. The Swedish railroad company will start rebuilding the rail tracks to Kiruna next year and has already shown interest in the project. “This is what I want to do, to play with this toy. It is small, it is specialised. This is the future,” Marek smiles.

Episodes:

Better than home
By Lasse Kristensen

There is a cleaning lady taking care of the flat where Marek and his colleagues live. She is also doing their laundry.

”She even cleans our clothes. When she has been here, all my clothes are in a neat pile on my bed smelling nice. It’s like coming home. It’s actually better than home. At home I have to do these things myself.”

When Marek was working on the Turning Torso, the tallest apartment-skyscraper in Europe, overlooking Malmö harbour, the Öresund bridge and Copenhagen, he really enjoyed the view from the top floors. One day, he suggested to a Swedish colleague that after work they might bring some comfortable chairs, sit down and have a cigarette, a beer, and just enjoy the view. The Swede replied: ”But that’s not allowed.”

Marek of course knew that it was not allowed to drink on the construction site.

”But I was just thinking that it would be nice.”

The Swedish colleague didn’t even understand the idea.