Mourning the Miners
By Denise Best | Related entries in In The NewsMourning the miners and challenging the system that failed them and their families.
A tragedy first in the explosion, then in the miscommunication that followed with inaccurate reports of the trapped miners having been found alive.
Great joy turned to deep sorrow and rage Wednesday morning when mining families here were told inaccurately that 12 of the 13 miners trapped in a coal mine were alive only to be informed, hours later, that they were in fact dead.
The first joyous announcement, of a “miracle,” was the result of a “miscommunication,” a mining company official said. The second tragic announcement, from the same official, came at roughly 2:00 a.m., interrupting and then silencing the church bells, the whoops of joy and the preparations for reunion with loved ones, who they thought had somehow escaped death 13,000 feet into the earth.
While this cruel twist of fate with inaccurate information is receiving much of the attention, hopefully there’ll be just as much a level of scrutiny as what caused the coal mine collapse in the first place.
“They told us our loved ones would be out in an hour and on their way over,” said Ann Meredith, whose father was in the mine. “This mine is unfit. They should shut it down.”
The Sago Mining Company has had considerable safety violations with a documented pattern over the past few years.
Time and again over the past four years, federal mining inspectors documented the same litany of problems at central West Virginia’s Sago Mine: mine roofs that tended to collapse without warning. Faulty or inadequate tunnel supports. A dangerous buildup of flammable coal dust.
Yesterday, the mine’s safety record came into sharp focus as officials searched for explanations for Monday’s underground explosion. That record, as reflected in dozens of federal inspection reports, shows a succession of operators struggling to overcome serious, long-standing safety problems, some of which could be part of the investigation into the cause of the explosion that trapped 13 miners.
In the past two years, the mine was cited 273 times for safety violations, of which about a third were classified as “significant and substantial,” according to documents compiled by the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Many were for problems that could contribute to accidental explosions or the collapse of mine tunnels, records show.
In addition, 16 violations logged in the past eight months were listed as “unwarrantable failures,” a designation reserved for serious safety infractions for which the operator had either already been warned, or which showed “indifference or extreme lack of care,” said Tony Oppegard, a former MSHA senior adviser.
“That is a very high number, and it is usually indicative of a very poor safety record,” Oppegard said.
Seems as if the dynamic here has been until an accident happens and lives are lost, no action or meaningful penalty is enacted to address and avoid such a disaster.
Much the same as a filthy, roach infested restaurant not being closed down until someone gets sick or worse, the poor safety standards and pattern that has been documented in this case is appalling.
With all the talk of investigations (Plame, Surveillance Gate) over the past few months over matters not involving life and death situations such as has occurred in the Sago Mine incident, let’s hope there is a swift investigation of this, as well as other mines, which may be ticking time bombs.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Deinse Best wrote:
Seems as if the dynamic here has been until an accident happens and lives are lost, no action or meaningful penalty is enacted to address and avoid such a disaster.
Of course, this selfsame “lock-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-escapes” dynamic could be ascribed to any number and manner of other preventable calamities (pre-9/11/2001 anti-terrorism measures come to mind). Perhaps it is simply human nature to lack the will to take any sort of preventive action that involves any substantial effort or sacrifice until the consequences of not doing so become concrete.
January 4th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Joshua,
I hope I’m misreading what you are saying.
I believe Denise is asking why this mine wasn’t shut down PRIOR TO this accident. Why were these 12 lives lost, when the Labor dept cited them 273 times? Shouldn’t they have been shut down after oh, I don’t know… the 10th violation?
These deaths were easily preventable. This is much more black and white than 9/11. It’s a clear cut case of a govt agency behaving like the UN… pointing out problems, and doing abolutely nothing about it.
January 4th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
I don’t think he has ever cared about civil liberties – he sees his job as protecting us, not protecting our liberties.
January 4th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Ford4x4: Even if DoL or OSHA regulations called for a shutdown after the nth citation, regulations mean little if the will to fully enforce them is not there, for whatever reason. I repeat my last sentence above, with a little emphasis added: “Perhaps it is simply human nature to lack the will to take any sort of preventive action that involves any substantial effort or sacrifice until the consequences of not doing so become concrete.”
Why wouldn’t the DoL have moved to shut down the mine sooner? My guess is that, like most government bureaucracies, KYAC (Keep Your @$$ Covered) is their default mode of operation, and they (or to be more precise, their superiors in the Bush administration) feared the more immediate consequence of the PR/political backlash likely to result from doing something as drastic as shutting a mine down – which, mind you, amounts to punishing the miners (by throwing them out of a job, however temporarily) for the transgressions of their employer – more than they feared the potentially much-greater but, at the time, still unrealized backlash resulting from fatalities.
If this comes off as cruel or harsh, I only point it out because it strikes me as nothing new in the grand scheme of things. Again, this same theme seems to come up over and over and over again in the news (9/11/2001 was just the most obvious example), and invariably the reason no concrete preventive action was ever taken boiled down to the lack of will to decisively act on the part of whomever was in a position to do so (be it regulators, law enforcement, politicians or what have you).
January 4th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
UPDATE: On Fox News this evening it was reported that although federal regulators did indeed find many violations, none of them by themselves were severe enough to warrant a shutdown of the mine. Evidently the relevant safety regulations do not provide for a mine to be shut down because of cumulative lesser violations, only for severe individual ones.
If this is true, then the problem isn’t even with the regulators not doing their jobs after all – it’s with the regulations themselves. While it’s still not clear that the violations contributed to this disaster, maybe it will at least lead to a tightening of mining safety regulations.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
I suspect the cost of bringing the mine up to legal safety standards was higher than the penalty imposed against the company for noncompliance. This is common is variety of administrative regulations.
The way to fix it is obviously to reverse that equation and make the penalty substantially larger than the cost of compliance.
I agree with Joshua on this point:
“Perhaps it is simply human nature to lack the will to take any sort of preventive action that involves any substantial effort or sacrifice until the consequences of not doing so become concrete.�
Yes, it is imminent danger that motivates human beings — not distant or removed danger. Case in point, I lite a cigarette. Many of you are afraid of the Asian Bird flu when statistically you should be far more afraid of electrocuting yourself with your toaster.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Well I feel so impacted by this event that i felt the need to express my thoughts.
First , reports state that each miner carries a device to purify the air for a limited time. Yet in every mine diasaster it seems to take a minimum of 24 hours (usually much longer) to get to the miners. My question is this. If air purification is such a factor in a mine accident why cant oxygen stations be placed inside these mines? Or why cant the devices be made to purify air continously?
Second if the lack of good air is responsible for these deaths then everyone from the goverment to the onsite safety personel failed these poor souls. The company should pay dearly for this mistake and the mistake of letting loved ones believe that they were coming home.
I mean how hard is it to accurately report something of this magnitude?
Third I read that a fight broke out and police were brought in. I am not an advocator of violence but in this case I believe it was certainly justified. Just imagine if it were you. This situation would most certainly drive anyone to desire vigilante justice for such a herendous mistake.
I feel so deeply impacted for these families. We are under threat of terrorism in this nation. Well I ask you this what about corporate terrorism? By this I mean corporations taking short cuts or allowing unsafe condtions to ongo at the cost of workers lives. Osama did not see any value in the lives he took and neither did the heads of this company (in my opinon).
The bottom line is most likely the cause of this tragedy. I can only hope that their made to pay for their blasse approach to safety. My prayers have been with these families since the start and will continue until justice is served.
If you are reading this then please join with me in making a voice loud enough to be heard by the powers to be. THANK YOU.