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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.