.: Curmudgeonisms :.: The Mine Story

By now you all should be familiar with the mining tragedy story in West Virginia which began with an explosion on monday, and ended - well, not quite yet. The missing miners were found wednesday morning early, all dead except one.
I kept tabs on this story for the most part, because being a former coal miner, I wanted to know what happened and why.

Of course, we won't really know any details until the surviving miner wakes from his coma, or until the feds publish their report, but that's to be expected since the only reports we'll be getting for the next little while will only be about how the media were so quick to report that all the miners were alive when they actually weren't.

Some Say Media Erred in Mine Coverage

I could puke.
Yeah, they reported wrongly. What's new? We shouldn't fault them for it as they were reporting information given to them by supposed reliable sources - one of which was the governor of the state. I think any journalist would trust the governor as a reliable relayer of information.

But I don't think that's the story at all. I think the story here is that there were men trapped in a mine by an accident, and that there were scared and tired people working their asses off trying to find these trapped miners. There were others above ground waiting for hours to try and help any men found. There were yet more people counseling and consoling families, preparing meals, bringing coffee and otherwise doing whatever they could to help in any way possible.
In the end, there are kids without fathers, parents without sons and wives without husbands.

In the meantime, the big media companies are busier than a one-legged riverdancer pointing and scoffing at every reporter who said the miners were found alive, and thinking to themselves "Sure glad I didn't jump the gun like that!". Well, if they didn't report it, it was because they had the luxury of time. Their deadline was later than the ones who did. Simple as that.

But at the same time, the big media is still trying to scrape a story about the evil corporation and how they're to blame for getting these men killed:

Mine had hundreds of violations

[...]
...had been cited for hundreds of federal safety violations since it opened in 1999, government records show.

Hundreds in a six year period? Eh, normal. The article states that this mine had more than the average violations for a mine the same size. That very well could be true.
But, that being the case, the finger of blame points even more rigidly at the miners themselves. If there were that many things wrong, the miners were not doing their jobs. The exception to this is this part:

"Nine times in the past year, the mine was cited for failing to properly enact a mine ventilation plan,..."

That would be the responsibility of the desk jockeys working outside the mine. They failed to push some paperwork.
The part about

"cited the mine for failing to properly conduct a "pre-shift examination"

That is laziness on the part of miners. Either that or they forgot to sign the book saying they did in fact, perform their pre-shift inspection.
The next part about

"...extensive safety problems that led the agency to close parts of it 18 times last year"

Again, the miners may have cut corners.

Why, you may ask, am I dis'n the miners like that? Well, because I know it happens. We used to do the same shit. I was a fireboss (an on-the-job safety inspector). I sometimes forgot to sign the book.
I was also a member of the crew. We took shortcuts. We weren't careless, but we did take shortcuts. We weren't going to shut down operations to fix a leaky hose, or a nick in an electrical cable. We would patch it and let the maintenance people perform the major repairs.

We also had our section shut down by the feds. It happens all the time. You fix what they want you to fix, then you go on about your day.

Who knows? Someone may have pissed the inspectors off. They can be a very vindictive bunch. After all, they're in a rather powerful postition. They have the ability to make your life miserable, just like the health department has the ability to make a restauranteur's life miserable should they choose to. The inspectors may have been harder on this mine than the other comparable mines.
You wanna see some ass kissin'? Watch a section foreman when a federal or state mine inspector starts poking around his section.

In the end though, accidents happen. No matter how careful you are, sometimes shit happens.
Daydream a little in your car - run a red light? No one's fault but your own.
Walk down the stairs - miss the last step and fall? Can't blame anyone but yourself.

What happened in that mine to cause the explosion? We don't know. I'm going to speculate a little and come up with a couple scenarios. Since I have had experience in that occupation, I can form a couple hypothetical situations.

We know there were two man-trips (vehicles which workers ride in) entering the mine when it blew up. Man-trips can be all sorts of different vehicles - mounted on tracks like trains, 'buckets' lowered from the surface, or even small pick-up trucks.
If there were a concentration of methane (natural gas) in the area where the miners stopped, it could have been ignited by a spark from shutting off the engine or lights of the man-trip.
Now the man-trip should have never been in an area where methane could have a high enough concentration to explode. It should have been pre-shifted - which is where a fireboss would take methane levels measurements, poison gas measurements and performed a general area safety inspection - prior to anyone else entering the area.

Anyway, I'm guessing it wasn't all that much of an explosion, or the second man-trip which was entering the mine would have been blown completely out of the mine. Instead, they were able to return to the surface on their own.
Also, the men close to or in the explosion would have blown to bits. The fact that there was one survivor - albeit quite hurt, somewhat indicates it wasn't all that powerful. Besides, those men had time to leave the area and barricade themselves from the area where the explosion and possible fire were.

Why didn't they take the hurt guy with them? Who knows. Maybe they thought he was already dead. But in the end, maybe he's lucky they didn't. It sounds like the air they were in was worse than the air he was in.

From what I understand, the others died of CO poisoning. They didn't die from the explosion, or from being burned in a fire. They died behind the barricade. The explosion could have damamged temporary or permenant ventilation barriers which could have short-circuited ventilation. It may have allowed ventilation of the bad air away from the survivor, but not farther into the mine where the others were. They very well could have trapped enough bad air in the barricade with them to cause their deaths.

The families can take comfort in the fact that they didn't suffer. They were probably scared, probably thought they would die, but they felt no pain.
The lungs prefer the much easier to absorb carbon monoxide to oxygen, 500-to-1. So they would still be breathing easily - not gasping for air - and they wouldn't be uncomfortable. In fact, they would probably just be a bit light headed, euphoric and eventually, sleepy.

They're still dead, and that's tragic for their families and friends. It's tragic for anyone who can relate either by thinking "What if I lost a loved one?" or "What if that happened on my job?".

Family, Friends Grieve for W. Va. Miners

Thankfully, these sort of tragedies don't happen very often.

Update: Like I said, they just went to sleep. On a note found by one of the miners, these words were written (picture below):