I have a favorite quote.
So why - four years after Sago, which was however many years after an untold number of other mining disasters - are we confronted with another coal mining disaster that, as of this writing, has claimed 25 lives?
A trip in the Wayback Machine follows over the fold.
I stayed up late last night to watch the NCAA Championship game between Butler and Duke, drawn to the potential of a Cinderella story represented by a Butler win. Duke won, of course. But because of this, I was up late and had the TV on upstairs while I wound down and did a host of before-bed things. I was able to see a post-midnight EDT news conference with WV mining officials. At that point, only 7 souls were confirmed lost in the disaster. The representatives from MSHA and the mining company and the rescue teams were discussing their efforts in locating the others known to still be missing. During the news conference, an off-camera reporter asked about boring a hole from the surface to vent areas of the mine. One of the mining representatives indicated that rescue teams were progressing and that all air quality reading to that point had been good, so they were holding off on drilling a bore hole. As I went to bed, I thought to myself - "It must cost a lot of money to drill a hole like that. They should be starting NOW, regardless of what their rescue teams are reporting."
With that, I fell asleep.
I woke this morning to the news that 25 souls were now confirmed lost in the mine explosion. I learned further that rescue teams had been pulled out due to excessive methane readings and that they would be drilling throughout the day today. The earliest estimate of letting people back in to search was 6pm tonight, and I'm hearing on the news that that's optimistic - apparently officials have conceded that it could take TWO DAYS. They should have started drilling RIGHT AWAY when they knew they had a hazardous situation on their hands - they'd be that much further ahead if they had, and if anyone is still alive in there, they'd have a better chance of removing them alive.
It was then that I started thinking about Devilstower's 2006 diary. I went back and searched meticulously for that diary, and then I re-read it. While some of the details may be different, the overall theme and shape of this disaster is hauntingly similar. Devilstower tells a story of greed and choices on the part of mining companies, and it just resonated AGAIN in the shape of the current disaster. We have so many new people here since that diary was posted. I have asked for and received permission from Devilstower to repost his original diary in its entirety. I would appreciate recommends for this diary to ensure maximum visibility, but please - no tips. This is someone else's excellent work and not mine.
Underground: Mining, Sago, and Death by Greed
by Devilstower [Unsubscribe]
Fri Jan 06, 2006 at 05:48:58 PM EDT
I've made little secret of the fact that I work in the coal industry. As a result, several people have asked me for my thoughts on what happened at the Sago Mine earlier this week. Thing is... I'm not sure I have all that many thoughts. Or maybe it's that I have too much of the same thought.
Even for those who only watched the tragedy as it unfolded, it was hard not to feel emotionally drained. For the families involved, it is so much worse. Betrayed and emotionally battered, they suffered two days of nail-biting tension, were raised to the heights on a cloud of emotional release, and then dashed down onto the rocks in an instant of all too public despair.
In one moment, their hopes, dreams, and sweet relief, were turned to bitter dust. Watching these people being ripped apart under the unflinching glare of the news channels was sickening. Knowing that their relatives died because of men who lied and tried to cheat safety regulations is maddening.
Knowing that this was utterly predictable, and that it could have all been prevented is infuriating.
Devilstower's Diary ::
To understand what went on at Sago, it's worth a little review on how underground mining operates.
Anatomy of an Underground Mine
Back in the day, underground mines meant a lot of drilling, blasting and shoveling. Not any more. These days, there are basically two types of underground mines: continuous miner operations, and longwall units. The "miner" in continuous miner is actually a machine. It's a heavy metal cart with a large spool-shaped arrangement at the front that's studded with spikes set with industrial diamond. The spool turns, the machine advances, and the ground up coal comes out the back where it generally goes straight onto a conveyer belt and right out of the mine. A longwall machine looks somewhat similar, but the longwall has a set of metal roof supports attached. The big difference is in the way they mine.
Image 1. Continuous Miner
With a continuous miner, you mine "room and pillar." The miner is directed by a wired remote as it makes"cuts" that are up to around thirty feet wide. It makes several of these cuts parallel to one another. It can also make cross-cuts at a right angle to the cuts. The cuts are spaced about as far apart as they are wide. This means about 1/2 the coal stays in the ground.
The coal that the miner grinds up travels by a truly ingenious system of self-expanding conveyor belts that trail behind the miner like a moving tail. You want to hurt your brain sometime, try and think of how you'd build this thing -- I've watched them for a couple of decades, and they're still a wonder.
Image 2. Mine beltline
The coal that remains between the cuts and cross-cuts form rectangular "pillars" that are the primary means of holding up the roof. A machine called a roof bolter is also used to screw long bolts up into the roof strata, helping to keep those strata together and make the roof more stable. Older means of roof support -- like the wooden posts and beams seen in so many movies -- are used only rarely.
Image 3. Roof-bolting machine
A longwall machine is different. It's designed to let the roof fall behind it, and mines out big rooms in which the roof almost immediately collapses, leaving only a small entryway and the metal barrier that protects the longwall unit. Longwalls can get more of the coal out of the ground, but the price is disruption of the surface. The ground above will almost inevitably subside above a longwall mine, meaning that any houses, roads, and stores above are pretty well doomed. Longwall also requires more strict geologic conditions to work well. So longwalls are good when they work, but not as common as continuous miners.
Sago was a continuous miner operation.
Okay, hang on, because here comes a glut of mining terms. Don't take all these as universal -- if there's anything miners are good at, it's inventing new names for everything -- but these will do for the rest of this discussion. The place where the miner is actually cutting the coal is called the "face" or the "working face." The collection of cuts, cross-cuts, and pillars all together make up a "panel" and all the equipment that goes together to operate in that panel is a "unit."
Image 4. Model of an underground panel
In addition to the panels, an underground mine is made up of several "mains" or "entries." On a map, the panels look kind of like blocks arranged in a neighborhood. The mains connect the neighborhood together.
To avoid many of the problems that occurred a century ago, mines are ventilated by tremendous fans that blow winds into the place at darn near gale force. This helps to assure that -- in the mains at least -- there is always plenty of fresh air and gasses don't build up. The main in which the air is coming in (moving from the mine entrance to the working face) is called the fresh air entry. So long as the ventilation is running, the air here should be good. Mines use barriers, generally walls constructed of concrete block and metal doors along the mains, or simple sheets of heavy plastic back in the panels, to direct the floor of air. Ideally, air comes in the fresh air entry, runs across the working face, and then goes back out through the "return" entry. Miners are then working in fresh air all day.
Something that is closer to the working face is "in by." The entrance is "out by." So if you were in the mine, and someone else was closer to getting out, they would be "out by you." Guys standing up at the face would be "in by you."
Entries can become quite long, making it impractical for people to walk from the entrance to the working face (you can't spend half your work day just walking back and forth), so mines usually install some transport system. Because the entries are swept by fresh surface air, some mines use plain old diesel vehicles to move miners to and from the working face. More commonly, tracks are put in place and miners scoot along on electric "jeeps" or "mantrips" or underground cable cars by some other name.
If you were working in one of these mines, you'd probably be quite surprised at your environment, and I can guarantee that when they get around to making the movie of the week about Sago, they'll fake it out, because a real mine is boring. Walking through a mine is oddly like walking through the cube-farms found in many large office buildings. The working area of the mine is well lit, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of equally spaced right angle halls, and all the walls are off-white. The walls are not black (except for the working face), because the mine is regularly doused in limestone ground up to the constancy of flour, otherwise known as "rock dust." Think of an office building crossed with a subway stop. That's a pretty good image of what a mine is like.
There are certainly mines that don't fit this mold. I've been in a mine where the roof height was only 28", and the miners could not even get up on their hands and knees through their whole shift. Even for an old caver like me, that seems like a small slice of hell. I've also been in mines where water problems made every day a festival of mud (including one where the miners had knee deep water with quite a school of goldfish swimming around), which is not a pleasant place to spend most of your waking hours. But most mines are about as exciting as working the back room at Target.
Oh, and there are rats. Mines have rats. I don't know how they get in there. I don't know what they live on when the miners are not around. If you've ever wondered why miners are always carrying some funny looking lunch box, it's not because of safety reasons. They're designed to thwart ratly paws.
So, a mine is like working in an office building. Only dirtier. With cable cars. And rocks scattered around. And there are rats.
Okay, let's move on.
Anatomy of an Underground Miner
Believe it or not, most miners are not folks who were forced by poverty to drop out of grade school and slink away underground. Mine jobs are generally among the highest paying in areas where mines operate (at least equal to the vanishing manufacturing jobs we so often mourn), and there's a shortage of skilled miners and mining engineers that's driving the wages even higher. They don't swing a pick. They don't yell "fire in the hole." They don't carry a canary.
Most of the jobs in a modern mine involve operating and repairing equipment. A continuous miner has electrical, mechanical, and hydraulic subsystems, and it's digging into rock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They need constant care and feeding, and fairly frequent maintenance. The same thing goes for all those bolter, mantrips, and other pieces of hardware. Repairmen in the mines can be called on to manage electrical gear that uses a whole lot more juice than your water heater, then weld together steel that's three inches thick. Then repair a hydraulic hose and stitch together the ends of one of those oh-so-clever beltways. These boys (and underground, they are almost universally male) are smart.
On the other hand, guys who work their way up to equipment operator may move nothing but their fingers all day as they direct their metal monsters along like giant RC models. These guys are even smarter.
There are still some "heavy labor" jobs in an underground mine. All those "stoppings" and "air curtains" made from concrete block that are used to direct the air? Someone has to build it. The tracks for the mantrip? Someone has to lay them. Wires for the lighting? And so on.
There are also a handful of people so incompetent at everything else, that they are assigned the job of just walking along the conveyor belt, shoveling up spilled coal, and yelling for someone smart enough to do something about it should they spot a problem. When I worked underground, that was my job.
Safety Gear
The most important piece of safety gear miners carry is between their ears, and the way it's trained is through endless repetition. Daily reviews. Twice a day meetings. Tests. Seminars. Anything to make sure that a miner knows how to stay out of trouble.
When the training screws up, there's some fall back gear, but first, don't screw up.
An underground miner wears coveralls with reflective patches and a hardhat at all times. Major roof collapse is thankfully rare, but getting conked by some fist-sized chunk breaking free will make you very glad to have your spare skull in place. The helmet has a light with a large rechargeable battery that's good for about 12 hours. Though the working face and the area around the mine entrance are as well lit as any office, other parts of the mine can reach stygian darkness (if you've never been in a cave or a mine, you have no idea what dark really means), so most miners just keep their lights on all the time. Miners used to wear steel-toed boots. Now they wear more elaborate footgear that protects the whole foot (but are darned poor footgear for running). They wear safety gloves.
The helmet, gloves, and boots get put to use every day, but the miner also carries some gear he hopes he'll never actually use.
Image 5. Mine safety gear.
In the image above, there's a small metal cylinder a couple of items in from the lower left side. See it? That's a "self rescuer." Each miner carries one on their belts at all times. Pop the top of this item, and there's a device inside with a mouthpiece, a nose clip, and a box of chemicals. In the case of a mine fire or explosion, miners open the can, clip their nose, and shove the mouthpiece in their mouths. Older versions of this device only took carbon monoxide from the air. The newest ones (not at all mines) can actually make oxygen. In either case, it's not pleasant. In operation, the chemical reaction makes these boogers hot. Use one in an atmosphere that has a lot of CO, and they'll get hot enough to burn your lips and make your teeth ache. Of course, the alternative is dying. Hot lips are not so bad.
The purpose of the small device is not to get you out of the mine -- it's only good for 5-10 minutes. You're supposed to use that time to get a cache of more serious gear. See the thing on the upper right corner of the table? The red box with the green hose and yellow bag? It's a rebreather -- also commonly called a "self rescuer" just to make sure the proper levels of confusion are maintained. These devices are very similar to those used in some diving. They produce oxygen, and recover oxygen from a miner's breath. If you're working strenuously -- say, running like hell to get out of the mine -- these things are good for about an hour. If you're sitting still, you can get eight hours or more.
Stockpiles of these devices, along with lights, water, food, and more safety gear, are located throughout the mine. On a panel, there should be a cache on the miner itself, and another within a couple of hundred feet. Additional caches are then located along the entries. Over the years, many miners have walked out, moving from one cache to another until they reached safety.
Mine Dangers
You've got your four basic varieties of gruesome mine death -- crushing, burning, drowning, and suffocating. It looks like the guys in Sago got stuck with #4, and if some of the information that's starting to leak out is true, they got dealt a royal suck.
The main causes of an explosion in a mine are a build up of methane and coal dust. Coal is a soft rock, it tends to have high porosity and permeability (stuff can move through it easily). It's also made from organics. So it's no surprise that coal seams often contain a goodly amount of methane. Sitting in an underground mine, far away from the noise of the working face, you can often hear the gas hissing out from the walls. In the working areas of the mines, the air being ventilated through the mains is supposed to keep methane under control. Panels where mining is finished are usually blocked off from the rest of the mine (by those concrete block stoppings), so methane commonly gets higher in those old, "stale air" panels.
Methane is not explosive until it reaches a 10% mixture with air, so the thing to do is set out lots of monitors that start screaming around 1-2%, check them regularly, and make sure that methane never gets close. This includes monitoring those old panels.
There's another big concern: dust. Coal burns, and the ground up coal dust that comes from mining and working inside the coal seam burns even better. Folks that work around grain silos can tell you that just about any fine powder is all too ready to burn, and coal dust is certainly no exception. It will burn explosively.
To prevent this, mines take the step mentioned above, they spray the walls of the mine with rock dust. Rock dust coats the pillars, mixes with the coal dust, and prevents a lot of new coal dust from getting generated in the first place. With enough rock dust, the coal dust is rendered all but inert.
So what went wrong at Sago
For those who don't appreciate wanton speculation, tune out now, because I'm about to indulge in the Bill Frist school of diagnoses from a distance.
- Bad ventilation: somewhere, the ventilation plan got screwed up. They may have had inadequate air to start with, or broken into an old panel, or forgot to set the stoppings where the engineers wanted them. In any case, they screwed up, allowing methane to build up in the second left main. For this to happen, it's also likely that they either failed to check a methane monitor, or rigged that monitor to look good even when it wasn't (which has, unfortunately, been known to happen).
- A spark: probably from the electrical lines on a mantrip. Sparks up near the working face are a big no-no, so devices there are carefully monitored for even the slightest spark, but in the supposedly fresh air along the mains, almost anything goes. Someone could have been welding, but I'm guessing it was a mantrip, because those things can throw out arcs as spectacular as anything you've seen on a San Francisco cable car. By the way, I don't think lightening had one thing to do with it.
- Dust: Sago was cited several times for inadequate rock dust. This can take a bad thing and make it much, much worse. When the initial explosion occurs (from methane or anything else) it shakes the mine, putting a lot of dust in the air. If there's not enough rock dust, the coal dust begins to burn explosively. Ever seen a movie where it looks like an explosion is following the heroes down a hall? It looks just like that. Only at Sago the heroes didn't find a convenient escape at the last possible minute. The coal dust explosion fills the air with smoke, generates enough heat to make the structural strength of the entries suspect, and exhausts oxygen in favor of carbon monoxide and an admix of poisons.
I suspect there was a methane explosion "out by" the miners who died. This was followed by a coal dust fire that ripped through the air of the main leading to the miners at a rate no wildfire could ever match.
Pushed deep into the mine by this roiling explosion, blinded by smoke, heat, and noise, with the power suddenly out, the miners huddled behind one of those stoppings. In the sudden confusion, the familiar environment they had worked in for years became a maze of identical passages, each one full of swirling smoke and poison air. They may have had access to a cache of rebreathers, maybe not. In any case, they likely spent their last moments trying to suck breathable air from exhausted self rescuers, unable to see more than a few feet, unsure what had happened, and praying for someone to find them.
I've said several times that mining is a remarkably safe industry, and it is. Being a miner is no where near the most dangerous job you could take. However, that doesn't mean there's not something singularly horrible about this kind of death.
The Real Problem at Sago
The problem with the Sago Mine went far beyond the number of safety violations. The problem was what was behind those violations.
Sago was not alone in reporting large numbers of violations. Other mines have also had numbers just as high. And believe it or not, that's often a good things. In a well run mine, particularly a union mine, miners feel no compunction against reporting problems to both management and inspectors. Violations are noted, because problems are being addressed. And small things get cited before they become big things.
Companies work with extraordinary diligence to see that safety comes first. Does that sound trite? At the company where I work, every meeting begins with a safety contact. I'm not talking about meetings at the mine, I'm talking about the corporate office. IT staff meeting? Safety discussion. HR benefits revue? Safety discussion. You can't go an hour without a notice on safety. The CEO sends out a daily email on safety concerns. The company recently put several hundred pocket PCs in the hands of miners, expressly so they could collect and report information on potential safety issues.
Maybe that all sounds a little goody-two-shoes. A little too PR. But the fact is, safety saves them scads of money. They don't do because they're nice guys, they do it because the top companies realized decades ago that they can't afford accidents. Unlike the fly-by-night vultures behind ICG, the big companies intend to stick around for more than a week. They need all hands on deck every possible working hour. There are many mines that haven't had a lost time accident in years -- not one person injured so badly they didn't finish out the shift. Can your local McDonald's say that?
So why didn't ICG keep Sago safe? Because these guys are vultures. Outfits like this exploit corporate bankruptcy laws to take over mines that are on the ropes, then squeeze their bones for every last cent. In the case of Sago, ICG's corporate shell game managed to avoid safety and environmental citations, to escape black lung payments, and break a union contract. Then they got to sell coal into the highest priced market ever. How nice for them, huh?
What killed those men at Sago? Stupid corporate laws that make corporations into "super citizens" and allow shell companies to come and go at will -- companies that squeeze out union support and ignore safety to make another dime. An MSHA that has been gutted and weakened (the mine where I use to work had an MSHA inspector on site ever single day, and sometimes as many as six). And they were killed by men like this:
Wilbur Ross, the New York financier and Palm Beach socialite who swallowed up the company, has been seen squirming before the cameras in the aftermath of the Sago disaster. Maybe he should have gotten his ass down there to rescue the Sago miners -- they're his workers. Well, OK, maybe he shouldn't have. But like other mine owners, he and his company didn't want the expense of keeping a rescue squad on the scene, which some speculate is why it took almost a full day to get the effort going. In any event, the Sago mine, like many others, had numerous citations for safety violations.
That's right. Sago Mine had no rescue team, a fact so astounding, I still have a hard time grasping it. But hey, if it saves Wilbur another dime...
And on a side note
Just one thing: Iraq is worse.
I mean no disrespect for those who have suffered so horribly in West Virginia. Though mining is actually a relatively safe job, there's still something so disturbing about being trappened underground -- whether it's a little girl lost down a well to a group of miners trapped under a mountain -- that is sure to draw a shiver from those who watch. And for the family and friends of the victims, there is nothing more awful than what has happened.
However, while our eyes are still red from watching this story unfold, another tragedy continues apace. Yesterday alone, 130 Iraqis lost their lives to the ongoing violence which is consuming their country. In that one day alone, a hundred and thirty mothers cried. In that one day alone, untold numbers of children went without comfort. In that one day alone, Iraqi suffered more than ten times the tragedy of Sago.
[Image removed]
And it's not a one time event. It's not a traveling show. This kind of huge tragedy is a daily event in Iraq. The same morning that the miner's bodies were finally recovered, a car bomb killed thirty people in Baghdad. That event got a two sentence mention at the end of hours of coverage for the story of Sago. Why? Because tragedy in Irag isn't news, it's life. Simple day to day life in Iraq is far more dangerous than working in the most hazardous mine.
When you think of the pain those in West Virginia are feeling, imagine living in a place where just going out the door is viewed with dread. A place where horror is as likely to be visited on children as on adults. A place where no one is ever safe, not even in their own homes. A place where no family goes untouched.
[image removed]
Sago was a tragedy. Iraq is monstorous beyond expression. And, like the Sago Mine, the horror in Iraq is all based on lies.
See what I'm saying? Haunting similarities. If I've done my job correctly in the setup to Devilstower's diary, your mouth should be a little agape. George Santayana and Rita Mae Brown had it right, but apparently profit makes Corporations - particularly those who mine - hard of hearing. What happened at Upper Big Branch was all too predictable. This, to me, makes the disaster itself exponentially more tragic and criminal.