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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
Utah miners' deaths a business cost
Detroit--The roof fall disaster at the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah on Aug. 6 that killed or trapped six miners, and 10 days later killed three rescuers trying to reach them, opened up a flood of information that disclosed much about the owner, the mine, the industry and its regulators. The mine had been cited for 33 health and safety violations this year.
The mine owner, Robert Murray, was portrayed in daily interviews as a kindly, white-haired and deeply concerned man who emotionally vowed to do everything possible to reach the six miners. However, a clue to the real Murray came early, when he insisted from the beginning that the roof fall resulted from an earthquake, despite seismic reports from the University of Utah that indicated the conditions in the mine caused the fall. His claim was clearly designed for him to avoid any future legal suits--an earthquake would legally be ruled an “act of God,” leaving him and his company free of responsibility.
Moreover, it turns out that Murray owns 19 mines in five states and is vehemently anti-union. All of his mines have long lists of health and safety violations. One mine in Galatia, Ill., had 850 health and safety violations this year for which Murray was fined $1.4 million, but the appeal process that is friendly to coal operators under Bush will drastically reduce this.
In another of Murray’s mines, a fine of over a million dollars for violations was reduced to $300,000. Such reductions are routine under the Bush administration--in fact, some appeals are never processed, which means the violators pay nothing.
The type of mining being done in the Crandall Canyon mine has also come into question. It is often referred to as “retreat mining”: after the forward mining process reaches the end of an area, coal stumps, or pillars, which are left in place to help hold up the top are mined out.
The theory behind this kind of mining, which I did for a while when working in the mines in West Virginia and which we called pillaring, is that by pulling the pillars out the roof will be weakened and fall ahead of you, thus relieving the roof pressure where you are working. It doesn’t always behave that way in practice.
I was a shot fireman--I dynamited the coal. Holes were drilled at the base of the pillars, where I placed the dynamite and exploded it with an electric charge. On one pillar that was flaking off coal rapidly, the holes had been drilled and my boss told me to go and shoot it. I refused, and he angrily shouted, “I am giving you a direct order to shoot it!!”
He phrased it that way to threaten me with being fired because I refused a boss’s direct order. I knew the roof was coming down any minute, so I told my boss, “OK, I’ll shoot it if you come with me." He turned on his heel and walked away--and at that moment the roof caved in and came down directly where I would have been working.
I refer to this to emphasize the point that there is a life and death struggle that miners face every day in the mines because they face a management that has only one goal: coal at any price.
In the more than seven years I was on the safety committee in my mine, we made a safety run of the entire mine twice a month. Never once did we find less than a dozen safety violations. Most were minor, but there were hundreds that were dangerous and life-threatening.
When is it that you learn of health and safety violations in a coal mine? It is always after a tragedy when there is loss of life that an investigation reveals health and safety violations. There has never been a mine tragedy report that did not list a long line of violations.
The violations are there every day, but they are ignored by mine management. This is made many times worse because of the Bush administration’s support of corporations and opposition to health and welfare measures that could save the lives of miners and other workers. If you don’t believe me, wait until the next mine tragedy--which is coming soon to your newspaper headlines and TV news reports.
--Andy Phillips
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