Something that has been gnawing at me about this whole mining accident- why did the rescuers have to look for them? Isn’t there some way to equip every miner with some sort of signalling device that would track their movements in mine? You walk into the mine, you put one on.
No more looking for survivors (should there be any), because you know where they are.
*** Update ***
And if this is not technically possible, why not just pre-position supplies every 150 yards in the mine? You know- a big box of masks and batteries and potable water.
gator
Good idea, John. Seems like somebody would have thought of that one before, but often it takes a tragedy to force change. If we can track all the communications of our citizenry thru NSA, it doesn’t seem like tracking a few miners would be a formidable technical challenge.
Richard Bottoms
That would cost money that I am guessing wouldn’t fit into their risk benefit calculations. Millions to outfit mines versus some temporary bad press. Hmmm..
demimondian
No, it isn’t possible, sadly. The overlying rock would block any signals which might reach the outside world.
John Cole
How do the radios work in the mine, then?
Gold Star for Robot Boy
I recall seeing a quote early on making the point of “We know where they are.” So, I don’t believe the rescuers were looking for them in that sense.
Those mines are fairly well mapped out, plus it must be known in advance where the workers will be at any given time. (It’s not like Karl Coaldigger says, “Hey, I’m gonna go bust up those rocks down there. Anyone wanna join me?”)
But, anything to speed the process. Signaling devices? Go for it.
Richard Bottoms
>How do the radios work in the mine, then?
The same way they work in the Broadway tunnel in SF. A real long antenna.
Angie
As far as supplies every 150 yards, or whatever … that would be like assuming every home in California has earthquake survival stuff. You just dont’ always plan ahead. And even given this, you still won’t plan ahead. It’s one of those, “it won’t happen to us” type of things.
Gold Star for Robot Boy
Isn’t space at a premium down there?
Actually, John, you being a West Virginian and all, can you tell us a little about the modern coal mining culture and how it fits into the 21st century? I’m assuming these men specialize in this field, with college degrees and such. Which means they’re paid fairly good wages. (Not that it would be enough to get me down there.)
Or is it still resemble the old days, where you work in a mine because your daddy and HIS daddy did the same, and you sell your soul to the company store?
BadTux
Uhm, radio waves don’t travel through rock. Now, you could perhaps run wires down the mine and put up a bunch of repeaters here and there, but it’d take an aweful lot of repeaters to get line of site on everybody working in a mine, and, frankly, the mine owners don’t want to spend that kind of money. And once the cave-in happened the wires would get cut anyhow so all info flow would cease at that time, not too useful if you’re trying to locate men who’ve moved since the last time their transponders pinged their local repeaters.
Another possibility would be to have the miners carry RFID tags (my own employer makes us carry a clip-on badge), and put RFID readers (w/wires running to the outside) all through the mine. But this would only note that a particular minor has passed RFID reader X. It would not note where they went from there (meaning you’d need a *lot* of RFID readers to get reasonable granularity), and because RFID readers have limited range, it’s possible that someone may have passed an RFID reader without being picked up. Given that these mineshafts can extend for *miles* underground, you can see why mine owners haven’t been rushing to outfit their mines with RFID technology.
Right now, the current “state of the art” in mining communications technology is that they run wires down the mine for electric lighting and old-timey wired telephones. My suspicion is that this is going to remain state of the art for some time to come, given that our government isn’t going to force mines to implement expensive safety technologies such as RFID, and they aren’t going to adopt such safety technologies themselves thanks to various laws reducing or elimininating their liability for mining deaths (under the rubrik of “tort reform”).
I’m sure that the widows of the miners killed here are going to just *love* the fact that they can’t use the courts to make it expensive for the mining company to kill people… and the mining company will gladly kill people if it improves their bottom line. I mean, c’mon. They have a duty to their shareholders. If killing people is cheaper than not killing people, if there are no real consequences to their killing people, why would they *NOT* kill people? Conscience? Gimme a break!
Remember, murder is quite legal if you are a Fortune 500 company that has greased the right palms. It’s only poor schmucks in the ghetto who get sent to prison for murder. This is one of the reason why Big Government is evil — large corporations are by their very nature a creation of Big Government (via the government grant of limited liability for their owners, thereby overturning hundreds of years of common law precedent that the owners of a business are personally responsible for the actions of the business), and it turns into a nasty cycle where the corporations and the government turn into one big glop where corporations buy politicians to buy laws that allow corporations to literally get away with murder so that corporations can make more profits to buy more politicians. I’m not quite sure what to do about this, since I’ve come to the conclusion that the limited liability corporation is necessary for a modern economy (I mean, it takes over five *BILLION* dollars to build a new microprocessor fab). But it’s a problem, and one that goes woefully under-reported by the (doh) corporate-owned media.
– Badtux the Libertarian Penguin
Gold Star for Robot Boy
And in clear violation of child labor laws, too…
demimondian
Richard’s mostly right. In most cases, radios in a mine work by communicating to a relay system in the mine. In other cases, a single long wire acts as an antenna.
In a disaster, those systems fail when the roof collapses. After that, you’ll know (roughly) where the miners were prior to the explosion, provided they don’t move. Since you want them to move, though, you don’t gain much.
capelza
Commercial fishing boats are required to have survival suits for each individual crewman and a functioning life raft (with all the bells and whistles) and an epirb (which floats as a boat sinks and gives off an emergency signal). Required by the Feds.
I think that John’s idea about stations with masks and water are a very good idea. Like fishing, coal miners are “out of reach” when an accident happens. They should have the same level of protection.
demimondian
Which is nothing on what AMD, Intel, or Via spends on the engineering of the chip itself.
srv
TEXAS!
RiverRat
Get a firking clue and engage some thought processes and don’t think “government will fix it”.
1. Education for employer and employee.
2. Employer: 1. risk 2. reward
3. Employee: 1. rish 2. reward
4. Negotiate
You can even add the cost of education and technology to the equation without involving “government”. If all of this adds $50 a month to your energy bill it’s maybe cheap. With Government it’ll cost you a $150.
You decide. Do you want some firking bureaucrat telling you how to live your life and charging you for it or will you take responsibility for yourself?
That’s the question for Dhimmicrats. Reflection or Infliction.
tbrosz
A paper on coal mine communications can be found here.
idioteraser
The trapped miners in fact did have masks as well as set themselves up a barrier. Any water stored down there would just add a few hours to the survivibility of the miners if they could get to it at all. I suspect when you investigate what miners die of in such a circumstance when a part of the mine collaspes lack of food and water wasn’t what did them in.
Also depending upon the accident the water could be contaminted making things much worse as well as that any supplies 150 yds away couldn’t be gotten to.
Any masks stored would as well add a few hours if kept in peek condition.
No matter how many supplies are down there the miners would have died before the rescuers got to them. Best thing to do is to improve the rescuers drilling equipment so they get to trapped miners far quicker.
If adding such supplies would make miners not die then they would have been added by goverment regulations. Odds are a study was done that showed that such added supplies didn’t help the miners if they got trapped due to an accident.
No the best thing to do is make damn sure they don’t have any conditions that would cause an explosion like the ones the mine was cited repeatdly for. Sooner or later an explosion would have occured in that mine if the conditions hadn’t been improved. This was a disaster waiting to happen.
John Cole
idioteraser-
A.) The masks they had only work for a limited time. Pre-positioning a few more would not hurt.
B.) One of the medical problems facing the current survivor is renal failure/difficulties brought on by severe dehydration. I dare say a little water may not have hurt things.
C.) You have no idea what caused this accident, nor do I, so claiming it could have been prevented is careless rhetoric.
RTO Trainer
I was under the impression that prepositioned stocks of such equipment are required.
The most reliable means of communication in a mine would be a telephone like the military TA-312 or TA-1 field phone.
If it were up to me, I’d run a conductor strip along the walls between hard emplaced TA-312 like phones. Then, say every third or fourth miner, or at least one miner in each group that enters to work together, would carry a TA-1 like phone that can easily tie onto the conductor strip.
It still has the weakness of breaking communications if the wire/strip… is broken by explosion, collapse….
scs
I heard on TV a doctor tonight (Dr. Baden on Greta Van Susteren) theorize that the miners may not have died from carbon monoxide as the media speculates, but a pure lack of oxygen. The doctor also said that the kidney damage is not necessarily caused by the lack of water for 2 or 3 days. What may have happened was, once people pass out and are completely motionless for days, their muscles release a substance that are harmful to kidneys. This damage can be reversed though.
So the key to is get breathing machines down there. Does anyone know how big a tank you need to provide oxygen for a person for 3 or 4 days? The other problem is I heard oxygen tanks are highly flammable (remember those seniors on the bus in New Orleans?) and not a good thing to have perhaps in a tunnel filled with flammable methane. So lots of technical challenges here.
B. Minich, PI
As a computer scientist who grew up in Western Pennsylvania mining country, here’s an insight into the modern miner (I’ve known many, including an uncle who was in the mines until recently, and my father worked for the utilities and the coal companies until they shut down locally, and he went into teaching). I lived in an area filled with old company towns, including towns by the name of “Revloc” and “Colver” – close to each other, similar layouts . . . and the names are the opposites of each other. Even though the company towns are no longer owned by the companies, they still look like company towns – unless you added an addition on your house.
While miners do specialize, this isn’t something that requires a college degree. Many people get into the mines out of high school, because it is great money for a starting job. Also, the unions have negotiated great benefits, and while non-union mines won’t have the benefits that the union ones will, chances are they will have similar benefits and pay to compete.
One of the problems with mine work is that it dead ends you. You get to a point where you can’t advance, but typically, you can’t make the money you are making elsewhere. You also don’t have time for school, as they will work you all sorts of weird shifts, and change your shifts on a weekly or monthly basis. The mines don’t really rely on school, but their own training to get you to know what you know. Its still very blue collar work.
Where I grew up was very dependant on coal – a there are several power plants in the area, and for a long time, there were mines affiliated with them. However, all the easy coal went out of these mines, and many of the workers in there are now out of work and had to find other jobs. Actually, coal is back on the rise in that area, but its mostly strip mining, which is very mechanized and doesn’t require people to go underground. There is some coal in the mines they had previously, its just more expensive to get – they started shipping coal in from out of state, which is cheaper – and is what shut most of the local mines down in the first place.
In very rural areas, mining is often the best, and one of the only, games in town.
scs
Perhaps they could bury the wire in the floor of the tunnel, by drilling a small hole. That way it would already be protected from any cave-ins. Also, what is the largest thickness of rock any wireless transmission can get through I wonder.
DaveC
Is there a problem with running a lot of communication wires in the mine in that it could set of a methane explosion?
scs
Okay, another crazy idea. Why not bury sturdy pipes, maybe 6 inches or so round, in the floor that connect to the outside and are constantly pumped with air. Every 150 yards or so they have a connection through the floor where a trapped miner can breathe from. I don’t know how much that would cost, but this “air plumbing” could work. Actually, they might not even have to bury them, and just run them along the floor. If they are sturdy iron pipes, they might resist a rock collapse.
OSHA Equivalent
Accidents don’t just happen. Accidents require causation.
Look at the company accident / MSHA violation history.
I am speaking from a personal-experience point of view. The history of the company on MSHA violations reported in various media suggest a pattern of avoidance on safety regulations. In Canada we had the Westray disaster in Nova Scotia. A similar history of un-resolved/un-corrected safety violations. A similar coal mining disaster.
As a result, we have the “Westray Law” that makes deaths from violations of safety regulations a criminal offense for:
1) The supervisors
2) The Managers
3) The Officers and Executives of the employer company AND
4) The REGULATORS.
This requires that the people can not show due diligence in the performance of their duties. Any company that I have an inspection history of multiple and repeated serious violations has, by definition, failed on due diligence.
Look. Safety regulations are a royal pain in the butt. They get in the way of doing things fast. They also have a number of dead bodies attached to every regulation. That is how the regulation was created in the first place.
In addition: Renal failure is often associated with compression/crush type injuries. Where a person has been held down for a long period of time, with compromised circulation, paramedics are trained to expect renal complications. We don’t know that was the case. But having more water bottles won’t help a trapped man. Neither will communications.
The only effective respiratory protection from Carbon Monoxide is an independent oxygen supply (rebreather / air tank). No filters are effective. At, dirt cheap cost, $500 per unit, what is the likelihood that you will get these generously located through-out the mine? What is the likelihood that you will get shortages and inadequate supply? For that much money, perhaps then prevention would actually be cheaper. Unless it is more economic to pay the fines. Look at the fine structure (and more importantly the penalty HISTORY) for OSHA and MSHA for the past 20 years. If it is more economic to trust luck and pay small fines…
Do you really think the Owners would want to choose prevention?
One additional comment:
Accountants can never see the effects of prevention, when compared to luck. Statistically, except for the largest companies, good safety is indistinguishable from luck on a small scale analysis. Decision-makers will rarely choose the expense of prevention on small scale actions when it is cheaper and easier to trust to luck.
My Definition:
It ain’t a crisis until there are dead bodies… or lawyers.
DaveC
Is there some way that hydraulics or compressed air could be used to power the rail system that hauls the coal out of the mine?
scs
Why?
DaveC
Seems like most electric railways produce sparks, and I reckon methane explosions are the immediate source of these types of disasters where the gas is trapped under the water table or sandstone.
Bruce Moomaw
They could probably set up a network of repeaters in the tunnels which could not only transmit down straight tunnels but (if long-wavelength enough) have some ability to transmit around corners. They could CERTAINLY follow John’s suggestion of scattering more emergency upplies at intervals down the corridors.
Ah, but that would cost (wait for it) MONEY. As such, it certainly wouldn’t be popular in today’s exclusively GOP-run government. In that connection, by the way, note Kevin Drum’s interesting story tonight:
_______________________________
“BURYING THE EVIDENCE….More from Ellen Smith, editor of Mine Safety and Health News:
” ‘It will be a long time before we know what happened at Sago. It will also be a long time before we know anything about the role (or lack thereof) of the Mine Safety and Health Agency in the accident.
” ‘Why? Because MSHA no longer makes available to the public its own internal investigations on accidents and the role of MSHA and its inspectors leading up to the accident. The last time MSHA conducted an internal investigation, the Assistant Secretary announced that serious deficiencies had been found with MSHA inspections and that appropriate actions had been taken — but the public was not allowed to view the report to read what those deficiencies were or what changes were being made to avoid similar problems in the future.
” ‘It’s not only internal reviews that MSHA has cut back on. The agency is even holding back accident investigation elements that used to be considered matters of public record, such as interview transcripts, rock dust samples, inspector notes and MSHA-approved mine plans. Claiming interference with law enforcement, the agency now holds these records back at least until it issues its final report and has claimed the right to withhold these records until all possibility of litigation has been exhausted — possibly many years later.
” ‘MSHA does occasionally release such records early — but only when it wants to, as it did with selected photos in the Quecreek investigation.
” ‘It’s worth noting that we’re talking here about factual records, not conclusions or opinions. The agency used to release such discrete factual items even during an investigation, including non-confidential interview transcripts after all interviews were complete and release of the information could not influence witnesses’ memories. Pledges of confidentiality, of course, were always honored, but rarely requested by interviewees.
” ‘Examples of the traditional practice: the Wilberg fire of 1984, the Southmountain explosion of 1992, and the 2000 Martin County inundation.
” ‘As a result of this change, concerned individuals outside MSHA now have no chance to examine the evidence and draw their own conclusions until MSHA has released its own conclusions — and maybe not even then. MSHA followed this new withholding practice in 2001 in the case of the explosions at the JWR mine in Alabama — and interestingly, key results of that investigation were later thrown out in court.’
” ‘Return to the former policy would be right, healthy and help keep the government up to the mark via greater public scrutiny.’ ”
_______________________________
Which, of course, is precisely why the current Administration isn’t doing it.
Krista
GPSs definitely wouldn’t work down there. Mine hardly works if there’s lots of tree cover.
Field phones could probably work. And if the iron pipes are sturdy enough to withstand a rock collapse, it’d probably be easier (and less expensive) to put an equally sturdy trunk or locker every so many feet in the shafts, containing the aforementioned field phone, a first aid kit, oxygen tanks and breathing apparatus, and water.
I do hope that the mine has to pay out a crapload in a lawsuit — it might make other similar operations more likely to spend some money on safety upgrades, if they know that an accident will cost them huge bucks.
The Other Steve
Interesting.
To me, this sounds like a good argument for strip mining.
Richard Bottoms
>Get a firking clue and engage some thought processes and >don’t think “government will fix it”.
Industry does have such a stellar record.. one fighting airbags, seat belts, crash worthiness. So of course the mine industry is an equally motivated bunch of corporate citizens.
Love you “toll road” libertarians.
Anderson
John is just too decent and sensible to be a part of today’s Republican Party.
Emergency supplies in the mines! Guards at chemical factories!
Those 2 positions would be enough to sink Cole if he were running for any Republican office above dogcatcher: “John Cole, enemy of American business.”
Shygetz
I read that there were 55-gallon drums of emergency supplies pre-positioned throughout the mine. I don’t know how far apart they were spaced, but at least some thought was given to pre-positioning mine supplies.
idioteraser
C.) You have no idea what caused this accident, nor do I, so claiming it could have been prevented is careless rhetoric.
Funny how you are ignoring that a number of the mine’s repeating serious violations directly contribute to explosions. There were problems with the shielding of the electrical equipment making sparks far more likely. There were buildups of coal dust making explosions far more likely. They had numerous roof collapses. It’s a wonder no one had been killed up to now in the Sago mine in the past two years.
You may want to ask a doctor how long you have to be dehaydrated to cause acute renal failure because most people don’t get renal failure that route.
They get it because of injuries like the miner had.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000501.htm
It lists the causes and the way dehyrdation is listed it means it has to be in addition to one of the ways blood flow was decreased to the kidneys. Sorry extra water wouldn’t have helped in that case. Do you have the miner’s medical report on hand showing the extent of his energies or medical texts?
John Cole
Idiot- You are in no position to state that the violations contributed directly to the disaster, because we simply do not know what happened. Any judgement as to what happened is premature.
Second, that is why I said pre-position extra masks, so they could breathe longer, and hten they would need the extra water. You don;t just get to pick and choose what items I suggested and say ‘water is stupid because they won’t breathe long enough to drink it’ when I suggested an alternate way to help them bretah longer, too.
The Other Steve
I still say the best example was the railroad railing against the Fed’s mandating they install air brakes back in the 19th century.
Not only did the air brakes reduce accidents… because they were more efficient than the old brakemen the railroads could run their trains faster and on a tighter schedule. In other words, they made more money as a result.
Don
When the question is “why don’t they?” the answer is always “money.”
idioteraser
They did position extra masks and other supplies. They had them throughout the mines. They had a barricade set up after all. They were in far better shape then miners of old who often died by the dozens each year. Sorry the only thing that actually gets miners out alive out of the mine is to not have disasters in the mine and to have the rescue crews get to them quickly.
Far too often miners were dead a dozen hours before the rescue crew dug them out.
And a methane explosion in a coal mine is something that can easily be prevented by not allowing the coal dust to accumalate or to shield the electrics so there are no sparks.
Also it should be noted that the mine didn’t have as many escape routes as dictacted by the MSHA standards. Even if there were regulations saying supplies every 150 feet with what you had wanted the mine wouldn’t have had them because the MSHA teeth were cut. The fees OSHA and MSHA level out is laughably so even in the case of conditions in which the workplace can blow up and kill all the workers. An $800 fine for such a offense is laughable to the company since they make that up in an hour.
http://www.msha.gov/media/press/2005/nr051011.asp
The above link sheds more light on how the mine disaster was likely due to the safety violations. The Sago mine has very low methane levels but was cited five times for allowing the coal dust to accumalte in the air therby making an explosion much more likely.
And the Mine company is blaming the accident on an act of god. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aWlYpyYjWrBI&refer=top_world_news
Considering their fubar with informing the miner’s families hours after they know the truth who would want to believe the mining company’s explanation? Was there a storm during that time? Was there lighting in the area? Someone look up the weather data.
The funny thing is anyone with a lick of sense knows that a lighting bolt wouldn’t have caused the disaster unless the lighting bolt somehow penetrated underground into the mine it would only ignite if there was fuel. Methane gas doesn’t seem to the culprit due to the low levels recorded even at that time of year in the Sago mine. Coal dust accumalation which is a violation of the Mining standards was quite a problem at the mine. Also it should be noted that the number of accidents at that mine was much higher then it should have been.
I think you are going to easy on the mine company considering the number and severity of the violations they were engaged in.
Also the mine was just starting up making such explosions far more likely especially when you add the coal dust accumlation and unshieled electrical equipment which was the mine was routinely cited for.
Anderson
Btw, what do you do with potable water? Pot it?
idioteraser
Oh btw the cost for 200 fines on the Sago mine was 24,000 dollars. In 2004 the mine had 68 citations. A number of years the mine had no violations whatsover. The next highest number of citations on the mine was in 2001 and that was 99.