Devilstower's mining story

by: Clem Guttata

Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 09:15:48 AM EDT

Still, it's great to see mining safety get a high-profile spotlight on the front-page of dailyKos today. I hadn't realized until this diary--Underground--that Devilstower is a former miner:

At this moment, rescuers are still trying desperately to reach the trapped miners.  The 172 miners.

Chinese emergency teams are searching for 172 miners trapped in a flooded coal mine, state media has reported.

Officials told Xinhua news agency the workers have only a slim chance of survival in the mine, in Xintai city 450km (280 miles) south of Beijing.

Should these men be recovered, it will not only be a cause for celebration, it will be a big exception to the usual course of events in China's coal mines.  More than four thousand miners lost their lives in China last year.  And the year before that.  And the year before that.

Despite regulations that say otherwise, mine safety in China is laughable.  Mines are poorly mapped, if they're mapped at all, and just as poorly planned.  Underground mines run out under thin, incompetent roof material, leading to collapse or flood.  Mining is done using the old blast and shoot method, often with homemade dynamite.  There's no roof bolting.  Little or no ventilation.  The results of inspections are decided through bribery. 

The miracle in China?  That they don't kill more people this way.

The huge losses in life for those mining in China in no way relieves the pain and frustration we feel for the families of the six men still trapped in the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, or for the three men who died on Thursday trying to save them.  However, the scale of the relative disasters does dramatically show the difference between a mining industry watched over by a safety organization (even one deliberately weakened by an administration that hates safety regulations) and one controlled by nothing more than the greed of the market.

Click through to read the fascinating details of Devilstower's time underground.

Don't forget the take-away either:

MSHA, even weakened as it has been, proposed more than $2 million dollars in fines for those violations, but Murray has paid only a quarter of that amount.  That's typical over the last six years, as MSHA has grown more lax about both levying and collecting fines.

Of course, the real price of operating these mines without proper safety isn't measured in dollars.  The real cost is what's been so horribly illustrated 1,800' below Utah over the last week.

The next time you get a chance to talk to a presidential candidate, ask them what they're going to do about MSHA.