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.
Before you go to work in an underground mine in the US, you are required to go through a course of training on mine safety. It's not a long course. Most of the time, it takes about half a day. Miners are taught about the gear the carry, including how to unpack and use the "self rescuer" each miner carries on their belt. This small box opens to produce what looks like a World War II-era gas mask. It doesn't actually produce oxygen, but it will chemically remove excess carbon monoxide -- generated when there is a mine fire or explosion -- from the air. It works... for a few minutes. The self rescuer isn't really designed to get the miner safely to the surface, only to get them to one of many caches of oxygen stored at regular intervals through the mine. The miner is also taught to recognize the reflective tags left throughout the mine, all of which are designed to lead the miner to fresh air, and eventually to escape.
When I took this training (two decades ago), the last step was to watch a film. This film wasn't one of those 50s-style workplace safety snoozers. This was a film made of footage taken from previous mine disasters. It was, without a doubt, the most frightening film I've ever seen, not just because I was about to face those same dangers, but because the film showed exactly what happened to the people in those disasters. The bodies of miners caught underground during a mine explosion were as burned and shredded as if they had working in the barrel of a cannon when it went off.
Despite all those warnings, once you're actually in the mine it's easy to get complacent. The working area of most mines is well lit. The walls are not black as you might expect. Instead, walls ceiling and floor are all coated with "rock dust," usually powdered limestone, sprayed there to reduce risk of fire and gas explosion. In a good mine, the working environment is well lit, well ventilated, and so coated with rock dust that it can seem like working in a stucco-coated hallway. Rattling conveyor belts give the place the feel of a factory. In many mines, the traditional tracks and vehicles have given way to small diesel pickups that zip back and forth along the mains hauling both miners and equipment.
Separating the active and inactive areas of the mine are barriers made with heavy plastic sheets, concrete blocks, and metal doors. These are designed to keep the air (driven into the mine by enormous fans) circulating through the working areas in the proper pattern to clear any gases from the face and ensure the miners have clear air.
Step through one of those heavy metal doors, and you're in another world.
There, away from all the moving people, conveyor belts, and mining machines, it's very quiet. Quiet enough that you can hear the hiss of water and gas being squeezed from the coal. Quiet enough to hear the coal groaning under the weight of hundreds of feet of rock.
In those older areas, roof bolts can become so loose that they fall to the floor. If the bolts are longer the the height of the mine, which happens often, they can slip down to form an odd forest of metal poles, with the boards that should be on the ceiling lying on the floor and the far end of the bolt still loosely inserted into the opening in the roof.
Corners of the pillars spall off, rounding the edges of each "block." Pillars slump at the side, piling up loose coal. The illusion generated by the rock dust is exposed. The walls are black, glistening damp, and soft.
In many mines, the miners never see this face of the place where they work. Inspectors still prowl through some of these areas, checking for the build up of methane. But for the most part, these areas of the mine are done. Unless, that is, someone decides it would be advantageous to return to one of these old areas and remove some of the remaining coal.
I spent a year working for the National Speleological Society, crawling through spots that were far, far smaller than any place I ever went in the worst underground mine. But those caves had a feeling of permanence, the air of a place that had been carved out over millions of years through the slow action of running water. As I squirmed past tracks left in still damp mud by sabertoothed cats and passed the bones of ancient sloths, I had little doubt those places would still be there when I was not even a memory. I never had that feeling in a mine. There are only mines that have already collapsed, and those that will.
The only thing that makes underground mining worth contemplating is constant, consistent, tough inspections by an MSHA that's allowed to levy fines that seriously wound any company that dares to risk its workers. In the case of Murray, his Illinois mine alone had 2,787 violations in just the last two years. In what kind of universe is a mine with so many violations allowed to keep operating? This one, apparently. 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.