You Can't Buy Safety At the Company Store
McAteer, Davitt
You Can’t Buy Safety At the Company Store by Davitt McAteer Every mine disaster in America is followed by an appeal to Fate by the mourning coal companies. The idea that death in the mines...
...The second is that Longwall is not as efficient from a production standpointit moves more slowly through the coal seams and also wastes time mining overlying rock when the seams narrow and pinch out...
...Some 1.50 sensors have been installed in the mine to detect gas levels and other conditions, and transmit them to a central data bank and then onto a wall map...
...Nine separate explosions rocked the earth as the fires shot back and forth through the desolate shafts, killing 78 miners...
...Such calculations are, in a way, flattering to the American coal king...
...He is told where the danger is, and where and how he can avoid it...
...So the coal is mined dry, the foreman and supervisor meet or exceed the production quotas, the union safety committee doesn’t get into trouble, and the miners work one day closer to explosion, filling their lungs with one more day’s worth of dust...
...The hunger for coal is just as great in Europe as it is in America, and the companies are just as anxious to push production...
...He believes that the “Farmington disaster could likely have been prevented by the use of limestone or water barriers as used in our coal mines...
...The miner is not taught too much about his own safety because he might come to realize that the companies are already needlessly endangering his life...
...This yearly sacrifice goes back through the century-in West Frankfort, Illinois, a methane explosion killed 119 men in 195 1-yet there is only one outgassing venture in the entire country, an experimental process by Bethlehem Steel...
...The question of why the miners are killed cannot be separated from why we let them die, and in both cases, it won’t be answered by looking at Longwall machines...
...The American companies give several reasons for their refusal to adopt Longwall...
...Moving from some of these new European mines into the American ones is a startling leap into the past...
...The extra amount of dust put in the miners’ lungs by the lack of spraying cannot be seen, and its effect on human health is gradual...
...All things being equal, the miner in a deep mine has less chance of survival than the miner in a shallow mine...
...The difference lies in safety precautions routinely carried on in Europe that could be adopted here...
...The dust mask, for instance, has been around for decades...
...Only one fully-equipped diagnostic clinic is open to miners in southern West Virginia, the heart of the bituminous industry, and in eastern Kentucky, no such facility is available...
...The American standard is probably sufficient in most cases, he said, but not all...
...The foreman, with his quota of coal to produce, can either stop production until the hoses arrive, or go without them...
...The American industry does have to worry about profits, even though it already makes far more than its European counterpart and its workers are more than twice as productive per man...
...which in turn reduces the sense of loss that one feels when he is killed...
...Longwall mining has several other advantages...
...With its miniscule number of doctors, its moribund safety programs, and its adherence to a doctrine of fatalism, the American coal industry tends to view its medical responsibility as a mandate to pick up the pieces...
...He also may tend to believe that part of the American ethic which associates safety with pacifism, unmanliness, and lack of courage...
...Most of the pieces are left behind...
...Even if they do, they have little power to change the company patterns, and they have learned long ago that the fine they levy will merely be reduced or eliminated when the company lawyers get together with the hierarchy at the Bureau of Mines...
...The hospital in Hyden, Kentucky, site of a 1970 disaster that cost 38 men their lives, is in a converted house, operating with outdated equipment under extremely adverse conditions...
...As Dr...
...But we don’t show them these explosions before they are hired because none of them would come to work...
...The Bureau of Mines has only recently given the Consolidation Coal Company a $200,000 grant to study outgassing...
...While each country uses its own method of calculating injuries and fatalities, the comparisons that can be made indicate that American mines are far more dangerous than European mines...
...European miners have to dig farther because they have exhausted the thick seams near the surface...
...But black lung has turned out to be deadly, and according to the Public Health Service, it affects one out of five miners in America...
...While most European mines use this method, only 2.1 percent of U. S. coal was produced by Longwall in 1970, and less than three per cent in 1971...
...In Farmington, West Virginia, methane and a single spark cost 78 miners their lives in 1968...
...Their loss is grieved, but the industry’s innocence is acceptedaccepted because coal mining is such a dangerous job, because hacking so close to nature with picks and shovels can only bring reprisals as nature takes back her tithe in men...
...These barriers are simple platforms hung from the roof of the mine tunnel at various locations, with boxes of water or rock dust heaped on top...
...The machines do cost money, even though the short-term investment could be passed along to the consumer and even though Longwall could get more coal out of the mines, a potential profit over time...
...The mine superintendent, if he knew of the decision, would approve...
...A Fiery Tornado There are, in addition, tested methods of preventing coal dust particles from exploding...
...Cy bulski, measure the Longwall machines, and report back to the companies on how the Europeans do it...
...Compared to the coal computer centers, American mines could be called old-fashioned in safety matters, except for the fact that they have not even adopted the antiquated methods of avoiding injury and accidents...
...The telephone lines burned through and no back-up system existed...
...The dangers of mining without them are not as apparent or as sudden as the dangers of not extracting enough coal...
...The chances of an explosion are increased by the large amounts of dust, but an explosion is still unlikely...
...For an industry that has so triumphed over geology and governDavitt McAteer adapted this article from a report he did for the Center for the Study of Responsive Law...
...The idea that death in the mines is unavoidable has grown with each further explosion, until now the miners who die are put to rest like whalers swallowed by the sea...
...The platforms will tip over if a strong shock of air is thrust against a suspended rudder, dropping a blanket of rock dust and water to stop the fire or explosion from spreading through the mine...
...Out of the $20 million in fines levied since the supposedly tough coal mine health and safety law was passed in 1970, only $3.2 million, or 17 per cent, has actually been collected...
...These visitors are not Ethiopian farmers in Disneyland, wondering how the metal elephant squirts, but they must play this role, putting down all the pros and cons, the how of the thing, when they know well enough that the real question is why...
...You Can’t Buy Safety At the Company Store by Davitt McAteer Every mine disaster in America is followed by an appeal to Fate by the mourning coal companies...
...This argument is unconvincing for two reasons...
...Miners put on the same overalls, wipe off the same coal dust, and crawl down the same holes in China, Poland, Russia, Australia, Canada, England, and Germany...
...Similar religious dramas are played out for more than 200 dead miners each year, and paradoxically, each disaster caused by faulty equipment or lax safety measures makes it harder for people to believe that safety measures would do any good...
...In addition to more thorough dusting, the Europeans use rock-dust barriers as a secondary line of defense against spreading fires...
...Poland, Czechoslovakia, England, and West Germany have established work-rotation systems that remove men from the most injurious or dangerous jobs after fixed periods of time...
...By deciding against Longwall, the American companies have determined that quick, inefficient production is better than slower, less-wasteful production...
...The third is that Longwall is most effective in great blocks of uninterrupted coal, whereas the U. S. mines have generally been fragmented by mixed ownership, and oil or gas wells are often entwined with the coal...
...The U. S. adopted a periodic medicaltesting system for black lung in 1969, but a miner is given the option of changing jobs only after the disease shows up on his medical examinations...
...His unenviable existence weighs down on one side of the balance-the value of what most people consider a life of drudgery set against the value of tons and dollars and time on the other side...
...The British operate free medical centers throughout the coal fields, and the clinics available to miners in West Germany surpass anything offered to employees in other industries there...
...American regulations require 65 per cent limestone, while the British standard is 75 per cent and the Polish is 80 per cent...
...The reasons they have not been adopted seem to uncover, not a sharky school of sleek, cold capitalists, but a hovel of drugaddled coal dinosaurs, waiting out the Ice Age in blind stupor, thrashing clumsily around the coal pits, unable to see things that would work for their own good...
...The U. S. companies can’t embark on too many safety campaignsconcern for safety implies a miner’s self-worth that the companies can’t accept and still justify their present practices...
...The first one, predictably, is cost...
...In the room-andpillar method, coal removal is incomplete, and gaps are not filled in, causing more pressure and increasing the chance that the mine will collapse...
...The European safety-selling is elaborate in comparison with the U. S., but even it doesn’t go so far that a miner will be too scared to accept the job...
...He doesn’t decide to save some lives by using Longwall, the coal king concludes, not because he is immoral or insane, but because the best interests of the industry won’t permit it...
...Since the 1970 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act was adopted, the number of fatalities each year has actually risen...
...Even if the complainers are not fired, they can be brought into line through subtle pressures like unpleasant job assignments...
...American operators have also argued against barriers because they work through mines much faster than the Europeans, and therefore it would be necessary to build barriers almost constantly...
...The miner is trapped in the shaft, injured and blamed for accepting the injury, sometimes even blamed for causing it...
...Second, the Polish mines have staggered the barrier placement to allow passage as well as protection...
...Every European country uses water infusion extensively, and in West Germany it is required by law...
...It was more than three times the individual rates for Britain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia...
...Rubber tubing is forced into the coal face, or placed near the work areas, and the tubes transport the gas to the refining plant...
...The shift to the new machines would mean a large investment, and perhaps even financial losses in the short run...
...His 4397 zlotys go much farther than the American’s There is enough money around, though, for the Bureau of Mines people and the coal company people to take trips over to Poland, photograph the computers, chat with Dr...
...It doesn’t apply to those simple‘ dust masks or the outgassing process or the shifting of people in dangerous jobs...
...As the Longwall lathe cuts through the coal, the area just behind it either collapses or is filled with excess rock...
...Once such fires get going in American mines, there is no way to stop them, except by cutting off all oxygen to the mine...
...In terms of time and money, the difference between 65 and 80 per cent rock dust is insignificant, but the American companies feel the extra margin of safety provided at the 80-percent level is not worth the trouble...
...After the original methane explosion, coal-dust fires ripped through seven miles of underground tunnels at Farmington, West Virginia, in 1968...
...Most countries have elaborate programs, with apprenticeships that last up to three years...
...In a U. S. Steel Company mill, a person who handles a difficult job gets additional “hot” pay or danger pay...
...The machine stretches across a wide expanse of the coal seam and is pushed forward automatically by a series of hydraulic jacks...
...The union safety committee might want to complain, but even so, its members aren’t likely to get any help from the district or international officers when they are suspended from their jobs for griping about safety...
...Just as there is no idea of preventive safety in the American mine, and not many hospital beds if accidents do occur, there is no traoe of preventive medicine, no sense of the relation between working conditions and actual ailments...
...The trick in this accounting is obvious-$39 a day is more salary than most European miners get, but it isn’t enough to outweigh the value of all the services, plus the better chance to stay alive...
...This filling process decreases the geological stress on the unmined area, and makes cave-ins less likely...
...Miners in West Germany, Poland, and England are additionally shielded from gas explosions by sophisticated monitoring systems...
...In the U. S., however, this well-tested method is only being utilized in a few mines on an experimental basis...
...To him, rejecting the Longwall method is an intelligent, rational choicecorporate health over the health of a few miners-and it is a choice that he feels is almost decided for him by the pressures of profit...
...Closing the Barn Door European miners are thought to be professionals-highly skilled technicians like carpenters or plumbers who happen to work at hard jobs...
...Marx as Coal King Almost all European mines extract coal through the Longwall method-as opposed to the room-and-pillar technique of American mines...
...in our mines they would be effective for weeks...
...It is a relatively simple, inexpensive device that blocks coal dust and other particles from being inhaled into the lungs...
...At the 80percent standard, no explosions can occur...
...So the foreman runs the machine, cutting ahead without water...
...Some of these U. S. investigators may feel edgy on these trips, perhaps a little sheepish, like hookers at a free orgy, but the uneasiness has nothing to do with technology-which they understand well enough-but with purposes...
...Yet in the U. S. Steel Company coal mines, the men work in constant danger and receive no extra pay for the greater risk...
...The drudgery of the job deprives it of any association with professional status-we wouldn’t ask professionals to do such a thing-and the lack of that status fuels the indifference that permits the further drudgery, which in turn keeps the coal moving along the chute without interruption...
...But it is useful to the men who run the companies...
...The bleeper summons him to one of the telephones located throughout the mine, where he can contact officials above ground or miners in another part of the shaft...
...Longwall also reduces the size of the mining area, makes for easier ventilation, controls dust more effectively, and cuts down on the number of workers needed underground...
...perhaps coal deaths are ignored for simple, petty reasons...
...This professional designation is more than a matter of status for the coal miner...
...In Poland the coal worker is now the highest paid of any industry...
...It was a tempting conclusion in Vietnam, too, that the economic interests were fattening themselves on the war, a conclusion that one could periodically adopt when one needed a reason...
...These have to do with philosophy, with the value of men as weighed against the value of coal, and with how much risk men are allowed to take when they enter the mines...
...In two recent mine explosions-the Sunshine Silver Mine in Idaho, where 91 men were killed, and the one in Blacksville, West Virginia, where nine men lost their lives-there was no communication after a matter of minutes...
...The Polish government provides miners with free medical care and treatment, in addition to supplying recreation facilities and other fringe benefits...
...Once danger is discovered, there may be a few scattered telephones to get the word out...
...There’s too much bullshit in these words-they clash with the easy way we can say themand they don’t get us to the end of the coal mine tragedy...
...The miners are shown these explosions to they can know what to expect,” he says...
...The Polish officials countered that in their mines it takes two men only a single shift to install a set of barriers-and these are effective for months...
...Dust in the Quota Besides rock dusting, it is also possible to contain coal dust by wetting it, either injecting water into the coal seam (water infusion), or spraying the surface of the mine...
...The reason the water is often not turned on in the U. S. mines tells a lot about the whole area of mine safety and what happens when regulations are taken underground, when the bother of adhering to a rule is weighed against the benefits of continuing production...
...Even the paycheck superiority of the American miner is dwindling...
...It is, however, certainly more effective than nothing...
...The Polish Jan mine, now two years old, is the first completely computerized coal operation...
...The European companies, since they are stateowned, do not have to worry about this year's stockholders meeting...
...Economically, the outgassing has proved so successful that the West German government is looking into ways to return to old, abandoned mines and draw off the accumulated gas...
...He said that other experiments demonstrate that explosions can sometimes be propagated at 65-percent limestone, a level that U. S. regulations require...
...The miner is trapped in the shaft, injured and blamed for accepting the injury, sometimes even blamed for causing it-much as a person thrown into a snake pit might be blamed for antagonizing the snakes and causing them to bite...
...It has also decided that a few hundred lives every year or so are not worth the price tag of converting to the Longwall system...
...But other innovations in the European mines, unlike Longwall, cost next to nothing, and a few of them have resulted in increased profits for the companies...
...The mine deaths are also more senseless than that, and they suggest another Vietnam analogy-that gooks of all races aren’t worth keeping alive-but even that analogy seems contrived, rhetorical, a formula...
...In Europe, training for safety adds both to the miner’s skill and to his sense of self-worth...
...Powdered limestone, called rock dust, is used in every country, including the U. S., to render coal dust inert...
...After a faulty dam broke over Buffalo Creek in West Virginia last year, washing away an entire valley and over a hundred people, a spokesman for the Pittston company which built the dam called it “an act of God...
...This belief is left unchallenged by the companies...
...Nobody is more like Marx than a capitalist under attack for his shoddy business practices...
...But since we have already produced a worse fatality record in mines that are inherently less dangerous, one wonders whether American mine disasters and deaths won’t triple or quadruple by the time our shafts reach the depths of those in Europe...
...If he has to accept such a job, it must mean that he isn’t good for much else, which in turn reduces the sense of loss that one feels when he is killed...
...The American Way In the United States, methane is either ventilated into the air or left in the mine to explode...
...No attempt has been made to rotate jobs in advance, thereby helping the miner to avoid black lung in the first place...
...Cybulski, every miner is given a demonstration of a methane explosion and a coal-dust explosion...
...The same corporate executive who seems so full of mysticism and Greek mythology after a mine explosion sounds so much like an economist in explaining, pre-disaster, why he can't afford to prevent the next one...
...In a suspended state the dust is nearly as volatile as methane...
...It has been recognized as a disease in Europe for years, but its existence was not officially noted in this country until 1969...
...The reminders are yellow signs that say “safety first” or “think safety,” usually crumbled or covered with the same unwatered coal dust that may someday blow up the mine...
...The American miner only remains an apprentice from one to six months, and anybody who makes it through two years of work is considered an old hand...
...Meanwhile, the European companies continue to protect their men from methane, and their compassion is amply rewarded with high profits from marketing the gas...
...Most important, the biggest single killer in the minesroof falls-is virtually eliminated by the metal canopies that form the top of the hydraulic jacks and provide cover for the men...
...Rock dust is applied to the walls and floors of all mines, but the Americans and Europeans differ in the proportion of rock dust to coal dust considered necessary to avoid explosions...
...This spreads the burden more fairly and reduces the possibility that a miner will contract black lung...
...Cybulski says, “It may not be necessarily successful every time, but if it stops one fire and saves one life, it’s worth it...
...Traditionally, in the U. S., coal dust was considered healthy...
...Because the situations are similar, the comparison seems to shatter the two main arguments of the American companies-that worthwhile safety measures are financially or technically out of reach and that disasters are beyond man’s control...
...But there is-one comparison that can be made...
...If the benefits would cost the American companies less, you can be sure that in their genius for comparative advantage, they would have found a way to give more benefits instead of more salaiies...
...The Coal-Mine Mirror They do not put this in their reports, but it would be tempting to conclude that profit and human life are not always compatible, that capitalism costs lives-but this is not the whole story...
...One large computer is used exclusively for monitoring methane levels...
...Picking Up the Pieces While the precariousness of his job and his comparative lack of benefits is blamed on a general shortage of money, the American miner is told to put up with it because he takes home more pay than his European counterpart...
...Water spraying, used in both U. S. and European mines, is less effective than water infusion, but nonetheless can be helpful...
...The Longwall machine is like a large lathe, a sharp blade moving across the face of the coal, slicing it off in big chunks and causing it to fall onto a series of conveyor belts that carry it from the mine...
...The visiting investigators also don’t write about how they can come back from those official trips and accept the continuing killing, or how officials stick around the Bureau of Mines or the coal companies knowing what could be done and what isn’t being done, and that should be part of their reports...
...Generally, the deeper the mine, the more risky it becomes to remove the coal, and the harder it is to pump out the deadly methane gas, to get fresh air to the miners, and to guard against cave-ins...
...His appeal to the inevitability of the balance sheet, to the impossibility of reforms under our present system, to the strait-jacket of the stockholderprofit cycle that traps him-it is a dialectic that takes matters out of his own hands...
...This platform method is decades old, but it has been rejected by government and mine officials in the U. S. as being ineffective...
...The choice is death by immolation or by suffocation...
...European mines are hardly a workers’ paradise, and they don’t stop churning just because some men get killed...
...Waclaw Cybulski, director of a Polish mine safety institute, showed me a ferocious coal-dust explosion where the rock dust content was 62.5 per cent...
...The reluctance seems to be that it slows production...
...But the West German government ran tests of the masks of all countries and found those used in the U. S. unacceptable under German law because of their low dust retention and high resistance levels that make it impossible to talk and hard to breathe...
...Fewer of them die in those countries...
...Passing the buck to Fate is made easier because there is nothing in this country that equals the dangers of coal mining...
...The black lung disease is a crippler and often a killer that accompanies the coal dust, inhaled into the lungs over a long period of time...
...If the gas reaches emergency proportions, warnings flash on the maps and sirens are set off in the endangered sections...
...The difference in the treatment of miners is reflected in the whole ethic of safety in the U. S. and European mines...
...The coal recovery rate is between 80 and 95 per cent, as compared with a 45-65 percent rate for room-and-pillar...
...First, U. S. companies do not mine thin seams of coal like most European operators...
...Suppose that a cutting machine must be moved to a new area, and that the connecting hoses for the water sprays must be brought in from the surface...
...The method is rather simple...
...Any spark can send a wall of dust flaming through the underground tunnels with the force of a bullet...
...If a hazard develops, each miner is alerted through a bleeper device that he carries...
...In America the coal itself is occasionally touched by the 20th century, but the miner, in many ways, remains in the 19th, or perhaps the 18th...
...Or, perhaps coal deaths are ignored for simple, petty reasons, reasons you don’t have to go to Europe to discover, reasons like the ones that potential supporters of George McGovern give for so quickly abandoning his candidacy while the war he would end continues...
...Longwall might make more money over the long run, but it is still a risk proposition, and his company is not set up to think about the long run...
...They are told that they deserve the best the country has to offer...
...From Shark to Dinosaur There is some truth to the financial argument as applied to Longwall...
...In Poland, according to Dr...
...After all, isn?t the pressure that forces coal companies to skrimp on safety the same one that makes car companies slap on crunchable bumpers, or cattlemen pump their meat full of fattening poisons...
...The British mine at Stoke-onTrent, Europe’s deepest mine, has installed a similar computer system and control room...
...Like the inside of the American and European mines, the goals of the people who run them are not that far apart...
...Even the difficulty of his life is used against him, as are the explosions and disasters...
...The federal and state inspectors don’t come around that often-three or four times a year, and they are not likely to catch the violations...
...So the real education in the mines is that there is nothing to worry about-or at least, that nothing can be done...
...American coal companies have not fully exploited the richer, shallower, safer fields...
...ment-pummeling its machines into the earth’s seams and getting off with minerals at will-this periodic appeal to helplessness is somewhat uncharacteristic...
...The point is that even a few steps that are actually palatable to production-happy coal owners can substantially lessen the pain and risk of coal mining, and presumably could be instituted here with similar lack of damage to the industry itself...
...The disadvantages of several hundred deaths are real as well...
...It was thought to purify the mountain air, as a charcoal filter does on a cigarette...
...In the U. S., the fatality rate per million man-hours during the 1965-69 period was more than twice that of the European Economic Community...
...All these disadvantages are real, but the fact that industry chooses to emphasize them says a lot about industry...
...For instance, every European coal producer practices outgassing of mines, in which the deadly methane gas (the single biggest cause of explosions in the U. S. coal industry) is captured, sucked out, refined, and sold for commercial heating or cooking...
...Underneath the value of all the fines and safety equipment, and measured against them, is the worth of the miner...
...The other excuse is that some American mines have very low seams and are too narrow to permit barriers, which would block the passageways...
...If there is any difference in the mines themselves, it is that the European ones are generally several thousand feet deep, while American mines are only a few hundred feet below the surface...
...The fact that they haven’t been points to more elemental differences...
...The men automatically evacuate the area and remain out until an all-clear signal is sounded...
...Instead of computer maps and sensors, the flicker of a safety-lamp or the handoperated methane monitor is the only way to guess the level of methane gas...
Vol. 4 • November 1972 • No. 9
