SAGO: WHAT WOULD HAVE HELPED?

The Sago Mine disaster is almost two weeks old. The Plain Dealer (which still has not mentioned the involvement of local corporate hero Wilbur Ross) ran yet another generic "Aren't coal miners brave and tragic?" op-ed piece yesterday, complete with Merle Travis lyrics and accompanied by a chart of coal mining deaths from 2000 through 2005 (not on line). There was also an AP story from Tallmansville about International Coal Group workers weighing whether to go back to work in other local ICG mines.

The PD's chart is titled "Coal mine fatalities", and cites reports from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration as its source. If you look through the "Statistics" links at the bottom of the right column on the MSHA page -- specifically this chart -- you'll realize that the PD's fatality numbers are for underground coal mining only, ignoring many deaths at surface mines. Even so, the chart shows an average of 19 deaths per year from 2000 through 2004.

What it doesn't show is the modest size of the workforce that's sustaining these losses. From 2000 through 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says an average of 39,000 to 40,000 Americans were employed by the underground coal mining industry. So those 19 deaths a year work out to an industry fatality rate of 48 deaths per 100,000 workers.

John Ryan pointed out the other day that mining, at 28 annual deaths per 100,000 workers, is only America's second most fatal industrial sector... behind agriculture/forestry (which includes logging, an incredibly dangerous way to make a living). But that's "mining" of all kinds -- stripping, open pit, longwalling, all kinds of ores and all kinds of work including office and management. Deep coal mining is far more dangerous than the "sector" number suggests, indeed far more dangerous than the overall 48 deaths per 100,000 I cited a few lines ago.

The death rate that matters is the one you get by subtracting all the managers, all the office workers, the surface support workers and inspectors and drivers from the denominator, leaving only the actual miners -- the people who take heavy machinery down a two or three mile tunnel with only one way out, and use the machines to chew tons of combustible material out of the earth surrounding them, creating an atmosphere of explosive gas and dust that's poisonous if not constantly ventilated, in a structure supported mainly by pillars of rock and coal that they've left standing.

A close look at the workforce and fatality details from BLS and MSHA suggests to me that these underground workers account for only about 40% of all the people employed by underground coal mining companies, but that they suffer at least 80% of the industry's fatalities. If I'm right, that makes the recent fatality rate for underground coal mine workers (before Sago) at least 75 deaths per 100,000 workers per year.

Translation: Out of every thousand underground coal miners in the U.S. at the beginning of 2000, at least four died on the job by the end of 2004.

There are deadlier U.S. occupations --- loggers and airplane pilots, for example -- but only a few. It might surprise you to learn that firefighters and police patrol officers are significantly safer on the job than coal miners (with 11 and 19 deaths per 100,000 in 2004, respectively).

Why does this matter to the rest of us -- specifically to Clevelanders, far from the coalfields? Of course there are thousands of us who have family members mining coal back home in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, etc.. But why should the rest of us have coal mine fatality rates on our lists of things to worry about?

Well, it's simple: We're all burning that coal. As I write this, the electrical charges marching in binary formation around my computer's innards come mostly from coal combustion. So do the data bits coming and going over my DSL connection, the power stored in my handy cellphone, and the electrons making metal incandesce or gas fluoresce in the five light bulbs I can see from where I'm sitting. The essential commodity of the New Economy, the electrical bit that makes the byte that makes the code that is the Information, depends (in this community) on the archetypal 19th-century industry -- people digging coal out of the ground to burn under boilers to make steam to turn turbines.

Their mines and my computer are two ends of the same industrial ecosystem. And I don't know about you, but I want the systems I'm part of to kill as few people as possible..

This is why fatalistic literary reflections on "the miner's life" don't do much for me. The twelve guys who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the Sago Mine's "2 Left" section were not Butcher Holler throwbacks. They were modern American workers, doing an ordinary job on an ordinary day for a very modern corporate employer. I don't really need to know about their tight-knit families, their church affiliations, their patriotism, their conflicted emotions about the job, their philosophical acceptance of death, etc., etc.

What I want to know is how their deaths could have been prevented... and how more deaths like theirs can be prevented from now on.

Now like most people, I know little about mining or mine safety. I have no idea how to judge the claims and counterclaims about violations and fines, ICG's ccompliance, MSHA's enforcement, etc. But reading news accounts of the disaster, and the narrative of the rescue effort on the MSHA website, I've been struck by three simple investments that might have saved those twelve miners:

1) A hardened, redundant communication network. The miners were trapped at the far end of a working section ("2 Left") a few hundred yards off the main corridor. Their only communication with the surface, two miles behind them, was a telephone wire. When gas exploded in a sealed-off section at the end of the main corridor, blowing out the seal and filling the area with carbon monoxide and smoke, the telephone wire was severed. They had no way of finding out what lay between them and the exit, and rescuers had no way of knowing their position or condition. As it turns out, the way out was not blocked, and there was breatheable air two thousand feet away -- but not knowing that, the miners put up a barrier, sat tight and waited for rescue that came far too late.

ICG's CEO admitted to USA Today that a wireless network could have gotten the miners out alive. He was talking about voice communication, but a carefully installed network, with both hardened wire and wireless pathways, might have helped in other ways -- e.g. by allowing real-time instrument mapping of gas concentrations along the exit path. Such systems designed for mines are on the market (see here and here, for example) but as ICG's Hatfield told USA Today, "the industry has not been quick enough to adopt the technology". You can say that again.

2) More hours of emergency air. Each miner had just an hour's supply of oxygen. They died when those supplies, and the good air in the pocket they tried to seal off, ran out. Remember, they were two miles from the mine entrance, with no other way in or out. Under what possible scenario could they have survived a forty-hour wait in a CO-filled area with the ventilation not functioning? Lacking communication with the surface, exploration for some kind of escape route was essential -- but the risk was so great, with so little breathing time, that they didn't dare try it. So they waited and died, two thousand feet from safety.

3) Multiple access points. 2 Left is two miles in from the portal but only two hundred feet down from the surface. According to MSHA's rescue narrative, a borehole was drilled from the surface into 2 Left between 2:45 and 5:35 a.m. January 3, allowing rescuers to test the atmosphere and do a video scan of the area. Presumably they could also have lowered a communication device or even an air hose. But the drill punched through nearly 23 hours after the explosion... far too late for the trapped miners. Here's my dumb question: Why wasn't there already a borehole there?!? If you're sending people two miles down a dangerous tunnel to a place where they're less than a hundred yards below the surface, every day for months or years at a stretch, why wouldn't you routinely drill a few emergency access holes, just in case?

A modern network, more oxygen, some openings to the surface. It seems to me that any one of these things might well have spared the miners at Sago. Together they almost certainly would have.

What would all three have cost ICG? A hundred thousand dollars? Maybe twice that? Maybe two dollars added to the price of a ton of coal that now sells for $25 to $35?

The current cost of Appalachian coal to the utilities that burn it is less than two cents per kilowatt-hour. How many of us would object to (or even notice) an electric rate increase of .2 or .3 cents per kwh, if it was earmarked to make work less deadly for the people who dig up the raw material of our illuminated, automated, networked lives?

Ohio politicians have been talking a lot about "Clean Coal". How about "Clean, Safe Coal"?