Home » Archives » August 2007 » Time To Seal It Off
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08/17/2007: "Time To Seal It Off"
For the past eleven days, we've been watching the unfolding tragedy at the Crandall Mine in Utah. On August 6, six miners were trapped in a cave-in during what the owners refer to as a "seismic event" at the coal mine. Despite significant effort to reach the men - trapped over 1,000 feet underground - there is no sign that they survived the initial collapse or are still alive now.
Last night, the story took another tragic turn as a second collapse killed three miners working to rescue the initial group. All week long, we'd heard about over a dozen miners who had requested reassignment off the rescue duty; at the time they were painted as "unloyal" or "weak" - suddenly, their concerns don't seem so unwarranted.
Tragedy is nothing new to the mining industry, or to America. Years ago, if a mine shaft collapsed and was too unsteady to be reopened, you sealed it off - dead miners and all. But somewhere along the way, we reached a point where that's just not an acceptable outcome - we need bodies, dammit. Widows need closure, and lawyers need clients, and the news media isn't going to go away until they've squeezed the last drops of life out of a story. So men go back into the ground - men who know far better than any of us the dangers - and keep digging for their fellow miners, knowing that with each second, the chance of the trapped miners being found alive decreases while their own chance of being killed grows. Last night, it was time to pay the toll.
Let me take a moment to heap an extra helping of disgust on the owners of this mine. The method of mining they were practicing is called "retreat mining", and is particularly dangerous. As you hog out the coal from a vein far underground, you leave pillars of coal in place to support the tunnels. But, since you want to squeeze every penny out of the ground, in the end you mine the pillars themselves - "retreating" out of the area as you do, since you leave it dangerously unstable and subject to collapse. These "seismic events" the owners keep referring to are nothing more than the underground tunnels collapsing explosively due to the weight of the ground above.
Now, it's the right of the owners to do what they want within the laws that govern their industry, but at least be man enough to admit the facts. The owners claim they weren't pulling down the pillars, and that the activity is actually seismic in nature. Look, I may not work for Caltech, but I understand where the earthquake faults are in the world - and you ain't got one, pal. The only thing worse than a greedy pig is a lying greedy pig.
The right thing to do now is to bring in a priest, say a prayer, and seal off the mine. No one should have to risk their lives just to retrieve the crushed remains of miners who died long ago. But will the owners of the mine do that? I doubt it. They'll wave the banner of brotherhood, proclaiming how no miner will be left behind. They'll bang the drum of patriotism, reminding us that their coal helps decrease our need for foreign oil. And they'll send more men back into the ground to face their deaths, all in the name of money.
is when politicians talk about 'rolling back red-tape' and excessive 'beaurocracy' in safety laws is that the simplification so often leaves the way open for greedy pig bosses to knowingly endanger lives (just a bit more than before).
