As mine safety worsens
Bush tries to cut inspections
By Leslie Feinberg
Shortly after nine Quecreek miners squinted at light, freed
from their underground tunnel on July 28 after 77 hours in
cold, wet darkness, reports about the avoidable cause of the
accident were unearthed.
The nine workers had been caught in a cramped crawl space in
the Pennsylvania mine, 240 feet below the earth's surface. As
they dug, a wall gave way that led to the old, flooded Saxman
Mine, abandoned since the 1950s. An estimated 60 million
gallons of water suddenly spewed at roughly 60 miles an hour
into the Quecreek underground passages.
Based on inaccurate state-issued maps, the miners had
believed they were hundreds of feet away from the unused mine.
State requirements mandate 200 feet of solid rock between mine
tunnels.
The mining bosses are required to get certification of a
map's accuracy. Who signed off on this map?
Some of the 10,000 or so mine maps gathering dust in the
state archive are crudely hand drawn and more than a century
old. There is a safe way around this problem. Miners can bore
small holes ahead of them to get early warning of flooding. But
Richard Stickler, state director of the Bureau of Deep Mine
Safety, cautioned, "You have to look at what's practical."
His practicality tallies in dollars and cents. Stickler
noted that such drilling slows the pace of production.
(thepittsburghchannel.com, July 29)
Officials at Stickler's state agency and the federal Mine
Safety and Health Administration are full of promises that they
will scrutinize the mining permit process, old map appraisal,
safety issues and the role of Black Wolf Coal, the company that
operates the mine.
But David Hess, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of
Environmental Protection, hurriedly added that the inquiry
would not focus on assigning blame. "This is an accident, pure
and simple," he stressed. "What you do with an accident is you
learn from them."
Black Wolf Coal bosses must be slow learners. The Quecreek
mine had already had another accident in its short one-year
history. And it owners have already been cited 26 times since
March 20, 2001, for violations of federal mine safety
regulations. (New York Newsday, July 30).
Officers at Black Wolf also operate the affiliated company
RoxCoal/PBS, which has had 12 mine accidents since 1999. In May
2000, WTAE-TV's Team 4 investigators reported on July 25,
RoxCoal had an accident eerily similar to the Quecreek
disaster.
Team 4 revealed that it was unclear when MSHA last inspected
Quecreek mine. The federal agency is supposed to check out
mines four times a year. "Internal investigations have found
the agency is not doing that."
The number of miner deaths has risen in the last three
years, after decades of decline. United Mine Workers safety
chief Joseph Main charged in March that the federal mine agency
was backing away from enforcement of health and safety laws.
Inspectors who do show up are rushed and frequently lack
backbone to stand up for the miners against their bosses.
Workers at Quecreek and other non-unionized mines have even
less organized muscle to fight their bosses around health and
safety issues. Now the Bush administration--trusted, longtime
chum of the fossil fuel industry--has proposed a 25 percent
cutback in the number of federal mine inspectors.
From roof cave-ins to black lung disease, mining is a
dangerous way to cobble together a living. One historian
determined that during the carnage of World War I, a U.S.
soldier had a better statistical chance of surviving the
battlefield than a West Virginia worker did in the coal mines.
(West Virginia Archives and History)
It was the formation of the United Mine Workers in 1890 and
its members' intrepid battles during the bloody "coal wars" of
the bosses that won increased underground safety.
This dangerous job is not on its way out. The shiny black
rock that accelerated the Industrial Revolution from a canter
to a gallop still generates more than 50 percent of the
electricity needs of the United States--a billion tons a year
are burned here. There are still an estimated 275 billion tons
of the 180-million-year-old fossil fuel buried deep
underground.
The workers who excavate it need the collective clout of the
union to protect their health and safety from the profit motive
that fuels the mine owners.
Reprinted from the Aug. 8, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
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