Interesting piece in the NY Times about mine safety. A snippet that made me see red:
But new technologies that might improve working conditions often enter mining slowly. Consider the oxygen canister carried by most miners. Weighing six pounds, it provides an hour’s worth of oxygen through a chemical reaction. The canisters have not changed substantially in more than 20 years.
An hour might have been enough to allow the Sago miners to reach fresh air, but the miners did not know that. Had their canisters delivered more air, they might have risked a two-mile crawl instead of retreating and waiting for rescuers who arrived too late.
Last year, researchers at Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, W.Va., did a brief technology survey to determine if these devices could be improved to deliver more oxygen in a smaller, lighter container.
“What we found is that there are technologies that can be used to improve the system to do all three,” said Michelle Dougherty, a director at the university’s national technology transfer center. “I can’t answer why no one in the private sector has thought of this before.”
Bruce Watzman, vice president of safety, health and human resources at the National Mining Association, said it was not the responsibility of coal operators to develop new safety equipment. “We’re not in the self-rescuer manufacturing business,” Mr. Watzman said.
Something tells me that is the wrong attitude to display shortly after a bunch of men have suffocated in one of your mines. Not to mention it is just obscene. The article also answered a question I had last week:
Communications systems in underground mines are also often aging and rudimentary. Most mines have just a few telephones attached to cables – identical to systems in use for decades. In disasters, a crew may be trapped far from a phone.
A few mines have antennas that allow radio communication by any miner from any place in a mine. Every miner at the Willow Creek mine in Price, Utah, escaped a major fire in November 1998 in part because many crew members had hand-held radios and were alerted almost immediately, Mr. Oppegard said.
Seems like these are entirely doable and common-sense things that should be done.
p.lukasiak
yeah, that part bothered me…..
almost as much as the part describing how the Bush administration took the issue of the troubled “rescue teams” system entirely off the agenda in 2002.
Bob In Pacifica
I wish there was a little less “seeing red” and a little more analysis here. As cold as Mr. Watzman sounds, he is absolutely right. He is not in the business of saving the lives of his employees. He is in the business of making money. He is operating a business in a region where opportunities are limited. Financial and safety issues tip further in favor of the mine owners because of the pro-business and anti-labor Administration.
Instead of “seeing red” you should thank these people for speaking honestly about their contempt for working people.
Lines
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a Mining Safety and Health Organization to make sure that these inexpensive things are put into place and used so more accidents like this don’t happen?
Doh, am I using corpses as a political prop again? Shame on me.
The Other Steve
Maybe all those $40 fines for mining violations can be put into a pool and used to research this new technology?
Mr Furious
No, motherfucker, you are in the business of making money off the backs of human beings who risk their lives for your shareholders. It needs to be up to the government to regulate industries who time and time again demonstrate no willingness to do it on their own. this is not a fucking market decision, and self-regulation is a fucking joke. The only way Bruce Watzman is going to do anything about the safety of his mines is if his office is in one.
While you are still seeing red, John take a look in the mirror, and tell me what you see. You voted for this. Straight up. Until you are ready to reconcile that, spare us the outrage.
Barbar
It’s not quite as simple as “evil corporation vs. good regulation” — the Times article also talks about how poor miners themselves can view regulators as opponents. So can we knock if off with the “John, you voted for death” stuff. At the same time, the belief that the market will just take care of this mainly serves to rationalize inaction and indifference. Regulation is not just “big bad government,” although it’s clear that a lot of people unfortunately believe this.
Krista
That’s why it annoys me when people say to dems/liberals/lefties, “Oh, you want a nanny state where the government is involved in everybody’s personal business!”
Um, no. We just know that if most corporations had their druthers, they’d spend diddly-squat on benefits, safety regulations, wages – anything that helps their employees (and hurts their short-term bottom line). That’s why we need government (which, technically, is accountable to the people) to regulate these mercenary bastards — because they sure as hell won’t do it on their own.
Anybody who takes that to mean that we also want government listening to our phone calls, telling us what we can do with our bodies, or telling us who we can or cannot marry – is being deliberately obtuse.
My viewpoint? I don’t trust government, but I trust big business even less.
Ancient Purple
Ah, the mentality of a corporate shill.
A thing of beauty!
Mr Furious
That’s not what I said, Barbar. Regulations ARE for more than the “evil corporate overlords”, they apply down the line all the way into the mine/production line, etc. It might mean workers have to wear helmets, or be certified or have certain training or equipment. Life vests on the boat, whatever.
Safety regulations mean that companies must invest in the equipment and training, and that workers need to follow procedure. Period. It’s human nature is to cut corners, take the path of least resistanceāfor workers OR owners. When you throw in the financial incentive for owners, somebody has to be watching out for the big picture/common good. Guess who that is? And it’s not “the competition.”
In a perfect world, industry could make money for stockholders AND do it responsiblyāfor their workers, the public at large and the environment. This has been demonstrated repeatedly to be too much to expect.
As far as John “voting for death”, he’s welcome to stick up for himself.
Jim Allen
Article in yesterday’s Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/09/sago_mine_safety_declined_sharply/)
A couple quotes:
“Whether the mine’s documented safety problems played a role in last Monday’s fatal accident is unknown. But Sago’s recent history illustrates what mine-safety specialists say is a longstanding flaw in enforcement of federal mining regulations. While inspectors issue a blizzard of paper citations each year, these violations rarely translate into serious penalties, even for the worst offenders, according to government records and interviews with current and former regulators. Large fines are rare, and the most serious sanctions — such as closing mines — are almost never used, documents show.
“*This pattern has been even more pronounced under the Bush administration, which came into office with a promise to forge cooperative ties between regulators and the mining industry.* During the last five years, the number of mines referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution has dropped steadily, from 38 in 2000 to 12 last year.”
And
“Comparisons with previous administrations are complex, because mining methods have changed and the number of underground mines has steadily decreased. But agency critics, including several former MSHA officials, say that relatively light sanctions, coupled with the Bush administration’s more collegial approach to regulation, make it harder for inspectors to force noncompliant companies to change.
“‘There was a dramatic shift in MSHA’s philosophy in 2001, with a new emphasis on cooperation by the enforcers,’ said J. Davitt McAteer, who headed the agency under the Clinton administration, ‘and it came at a cost of less enforcement of the statute.'”
KCinDC
There was another post several weeks back where John expressed shock that a corporation would put profits above the interests of its workers, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Al Maviva
Geez, we went through this last week.
Bush’s dismal mining safety record in his dismal first five years in office… has seen a marked decrease (perhaps even a statistically insignificant decrease, given the small number to begin with) in the number of mining deaths. The ratio of tons mined per person employed in the industry is up, so the rate of casualties per ton mined is down. The casualties per capita is up slightly, which means that although fewer people are employed in mining, they are a lot more product and the job is slightly riskier(but probably the increased risk is statistically insignificant).
And finally. You can have infinite amount of safety, for an infinite amount of cost. You can have no safety, for no cost. The line is somewhere in the middle. Everybody and his brother has a plan to make mines safer. Why the heck isn’t every single one of these plans implemented? After all, what kind of a cruel person could possibly compromise the safety of another human being?
Might I suggest that the Evil and Bloody Handed Corporations aren’t the sole determinants of how much money is spent on mine safety? How much are you willing to pay for your electrical power? I know, I know, it doesn’t have to cost the millions of consumers anything, we can just confiscate some hundreds from the plutocrats, who were going to use the Benjamins to light their Cohibas, and that should cover the costs…
Jim Allen
Al, how many deaths do you consider acceptable?
Lines
if you ask Al a simple question, you’ll get 3 hours of pontification with numerical assessments using data that only supports his position, with all other data conveniently ignored.
Al ignores the fact that enforcement in the late 90’s from Democratic influences in the mining industry are most likely what has driven mining deaths down. That, and the shutdown of a few dozen mines that were run poorly and ended in bankruptcy.
Ignore the deaths, because Al says they are insignificant. Whats important is that stockholders are appropriately rewarded in the short term by increased output of the mines. Ignore reports of the MSHA ignoring enforcment of violations because they lack the funding. Ignore the 128 violations from the Sago mine and ignore the 12 deaths this week, because, well, Bush is a swell guy that Al wants to have a beer with.
The Other Steve
It wasn’t quite clear to me when you made this claim, that you had backed it up with a substantial argument.
You used data from 2000-2004… but many of these mines shutdown from 2002-2004, and have only started to operate again in 2005, where you have no data.
The Other Steve
I think the market can change this, if you recognize that consumer sentiment is a big part of the market.
Calling a corporation evil is the Free Market in action. Branding a corporation as irresponsible is the Free Market in action. I realize this is something that Republicans would want us all to ignore when they call people holding companies to account names, but that’s because they don’t believe in Free Markets.
Whether it be Dolphin free tuna, or clear cutting forests, it is possible for consumers to change the behavior of corporations by demanding more responsibly created products.
I don’t believe govt shouldn’t be involved, but I think it behoves us to act as Free Market consumers when necessary and when govt is not acting in our best interests. Demanding safer mining practices is certainly an example of how we can promote such change.
scs
Why isn’t the government trying to get some reseach done on this? The senators from the coal mining states should have urged the senate to pass legislation to fund some safety research for coal mines a long time ago. If congress can afford millions for bridges to nowhere, they could certainly afford this. And if the senators from those states can’t get that passed, what good are they? After all, that would be some pork no one should mind.
Krista
The Other Steve – Do consumers actually have that much of a choice, however? To use your tuna analogy, I have a very clear range of choices at the grocery store, and can easily choose tuna that doesn’t fuck with Flipper. But a coal mine? I don’t have a choice as to what sources of energy any given energy company uses. Do I have a choice as to which energy company I use? I know that where I live right now, I have no choice. I go with Nova Scotia Power, or I stock the hell up on Duracells. Maybe it’s different in the U.S. Is there enough consumer choice in energy companies that consumers can elect to go with energy companies that only source from mines with excellent safety records?
And what would it then cost the consumers? Tuna makes up a pretty low percentage of my household expenditures. My power bill makes up a significantly higher percentage of my household expenditures. There is probably a pretty sizeable number of people in the U.S. that have a hard time paying their power bill already. They cannot afford to pay more, and may have to choose between their livelihood and their conscience.
Unfortunately, many businesses, when pressed to be ethical, choose to pass any associated costs on to the consumer, instead of absorbing said costs. That sometimes puts the business’ products/services out of reach of a segment of society. They then lose that business, and use that as justification to abandon ethical practices. (All while their CEOs are making million-dollar bonuses, of course.)
That’s why the idea that the free market will take care of this is a dangerous idea. A lot of people dare not demand things of the companies on whom they depend, because they literally cannot afford to pay for the resultant costs of those demands being met.
Mr Furious
The problem is the Senators from the coal mining states are almost surely looking out for the bottom lines of the coal mining industry, not the miners themselves. And as far as funding research on safety? That would likely only end up with recommendations of implementing expensive safety measures. Who the hell would want that? I mean, besides miners and the public…
W.B. Reeves
I think Al has answered his own question.
Richard Bottoms
How un-Libertarian of both of you. The government should have no hand in discouraging private enterprise. Only the market should determine if the company is fit to survive.
Blah, blah, blah…
Mr Furious
Krista’s right. the public cannot effectively bring “market pressure” to bear on every business, on utilities in particular. Do you have a choice in electric service where you live, Steve? A say in whether they use coal, gas or nukes to generate that power?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The “choice” I am offered on my natural gas? It’s the supplier. Whatever the hell that means. Supposedly it will always be (minutely) cheaper than Detroit Edison, but it all still comes on the same bill. I’m just selecting a different middle man.
That’s the downside of economies of scale. Since so many corporations are so big now, they can weather the “protest” of a group of consumers, even if it’s a whole locality. Local stores, business and even utilities might be forced into responding to consumer demandābut there aren’t so many of those around anymore.
scs
Hey Krista, not to change the subject, but do you have any Anne of Green Gables stories? Do you live on P.E.I? I used to be (am) a fan.
Krista
scs – PEI’s not part of Nova Scotia. It’s its own province. But yes, I’ve been there many times, and have seen the actual Green Gables house. I’ve always loved those books, and have read most of L.M. Montgomery’s work.
scs
Awesome! We should have an open “Anne of Green Gables” post on here! I’m sure all the guys would love that.
Krista
Probably about as much as they liked myself, Stormy and capelza waxing rhaphsodic about handbags and lingerie. ;)
I’ve always had a soft spot for Anne, though, being a fellow freckled redhead.
Krista
Exactly. If I had issues with the practices of our power company, what options do I have? I don’t have the financial wherewithall to invest in enough solar panels/windmills to go off the grid altogether. The larger the conglomerate, the more they have us by the short hairs. And they know it.
Al Maviva
Other Steve, you are either inadvertantly mistaken or intentionally mis-stating the figures I used. I used figures from 96 – 2004. Go look at the comment.
And Jim, your “how many dead people are acceptable” is a great translation into question format, of “I’d pay anything for worker safety.” That’s a great sentiment which every shocked consumer holds in the wake of the latest workplace accident to catch media attention, but I’d submit it isn’t borne out in consumer preferences. I’m positive that electronics goods made in America are made under safer conditions that those made in China and Taiwan and Singapore (not to mention fairer labor standards) – yet how many of you are willing to pay the higher prices for the U.S. made goods based on the safety and labor rights rationale?
Jim Allen
It was a serious question, Al. In your opinion, in order to maintain the flow of coal to the power plants in the US, how many deaths are acceptable?
Is the current rate acceptable to you? If so, say so. If not, and you don’t believe “zero” is achievable/realistic, give me a number between zero and the current rate (however you chose to calculate it, whether it’s per capita, per man-hour, per ton extracted) that you would think was acceptable.
W.B. Reeves
I think Al’s point is that the acceptable number of deaths is whatever the market will bear. You see, in Al’s world it isn’t the mine owners, regulators or anyone else with a direct responsibity for mine safety who is at fault. The real culprits are those nasty energy consumers like you and I. It’s our selfish desire not to pay higher energy prices that caused the deaths in WV. If we were just willing to shell out, the mining companies would be delighted to plow the extra cash back into safety improvements. The judgements of the marketplace are just and righteous altogether. The blood of the WV coal miners is on the hands of the American consumer.
Welcome to the madcap world of the Market Theocrat.
Krista
Please tell me that some people don’t actually believe that…not with the obscene salaries and bonuses that a lot of CEOs are making.
W.B. Reeves
Evidently Al does. Or at least he wants us to believe that he does.
Richard Bottoms
>Seems like these are entirely doable and common-sense things that should be done.
But your side hates the EPA, OSHA and litigation that makes them do stuff like this. So now what? Appeal to the goodness of their hearts?
Richard Bottoms
Not mine. I am a liberal. I support forcing the companies to protec their workers better.
The marketplace won’t do shit. The companies will avoid anything that diverts one penny more from the bottom line.
Thirteen dead miners X $500,000 each + lawyer fees = less than upgrading all the mines they own. Conclusion: too bad suckers.
Al Maviva
Thereās no way to predict how many deaths will occur in the future from measures taken or not taken, when the casualty rate is statistically as low as it is. You are talking about future acts, with many unknown factors, where the incidence of fatal accidents isn’t high enough to be statistically significant. When the death rate is around 25 people per year, per roughly 500 million tons of coal mined (assuming I havenāt misplaced a decimal from last weekās reading of the figures) you are talking about a tiny amount of risk of this kind of incident – though heavy machinery work is by its nature very hazardous and many other injuries do occur. Yet without getting into the detailed assessments of how each of those casualties occurred, you canāt even make an educated guess about what safety measures ought to be tried. Is there a trend? Or did last year’s 25 or 30 casualties occur by different causes? If I have time to do so, Iāll try to dig up last yearās accident reports and blog about the particular accidents.
Perhaps Iām a bloodthirsty market theocrat, but Iād submit that the things that actually cause particular accidents ought to be looked at, then compared to the cost of remedy, and then an educated decision should be made by regulators, and yes, market actors including the laborers (through union safety shops) and corporations. Itās easy and cheap to wave around the most recent example of an industrial disaster as proof that particular safety measures should be taken, but unless the forensics of the particular disaster are known, remedy waving is just a blind reflex which doesn’t offer actual solutions to the problem.
How many millions of dollars is a life worth? About $5 million, is the figure I usually hear, based on jury awards and litigation cost. Itās a callous way of thinking about it, but the line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise ānot one more lifeā becomes the standard by which you set safety regulations, and thatās an absolutely irrational way of doing it. A corporation should take every reasonable step to prevent injury, as should workers and their advocates, but if every single possible precaution *must* be taken, the price of anything subject to this safety regime will skyrocket because there are always more precautions that can be taken. And still, you canāt prevent all operator headspace errors and stupid things like slip & fall in an inherently wet, dirty and rugged environment. Even if the cost of trying to ensure womb-to-tomb safety wasnāt prohibitive, how is a corporation (or a government regulator) supposed to evaluate which safety measures to implement, when the amount of safety equipment to be procured is an infinitely expanding variable?
Iāve worked in a construction firm doing pricing estimates and project management, and yes, hands on work, and firms price the jobs assuming there will be āXā deaths and āYā injuries per hundred thousand feet of construction, no matter what safety measures are in place. $5 million in insurance per anticipated casualty was how we priced insurance for our jobs. No matter what we did, however, sooner or later, somebody screwed up, often in new and unforeseen ways. Nobody in our company ever died, but guys in other subcontractor firms did. You can bring in the regulators for advice, and we usually brought them in, in concert with the consolidated union safety and health shop for technical assistance, we had weekly and daily safety briefings along with all sorts of workplace propaganda and reminders, and still guys would do stupid shit and hurt themselves. We had one guy injure himself in a fall from a ladder, even though heād had a safety briefing on ladders 20 minutes earlier. The ladder was secured to the building, the guy had his gloves, his goggles, his helmet and his safety strap, but he fell because he didnāt want to completely secure his safety strap because it was a hassle to remove and re-secure, so he partially fastened it so it looked secure to people on the ground, but was in fact not secure. How the hell could we have changed that outcome? Iām looking for your output here Jim: how many blown out knees are acceptable to you? I suppose we could have put all the crews in Styrofoam bubbles and asbestos mittsā¦ how beastly and bloodthirsty that we didnāt go the extra mile for the poor exploited workers.
At some point, safety measures have a point of greatly diminished returns and businesses and regulators have to make a call on the most practical and cost effective methods of ensuring safety. They do it by comparing numbers. Comparing the mining casualties of āthe old days: with the present extremely low level of casualties, I think cost/benefits is a fair question to ask, as are questions about causation, and whether or not proposed measures would meet actual identified hazards, rather than just make us feel good that we ādid something.ā This thing about respirators providing an hourās worth of air is a great example. It would have given these minersā¦ one more hour before suffocating. I donāt see how itās directly related to whatever hazard caused the explosion. Hey, maybe Iām just a blood soaked capitalist greedhead, but Iād personally ask about what caused the explosion in the first place, and thatās where Iād considered applying my regulatory resources first. Iād put some stock in a study looking at what the greatest hazards are in the vast run of mines, and then looking at remedying those hazards. When thereās no causative data, then suggesting āaā or ābā to improve safety, is about as logical as putting bandaids on your elbow, because you *could* get cut there, and besides, that last cut on your knee was a bitch so you felt you needed to do something proactive about it. Iād rather ask how the cut occurred and whether that particular sharp object could somehow be blunted. But when all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
tbrosz
I hate to bring some data into the rant fest, but there’s a pretty good paper on mining breathing equipment here.
There are three basic technologies: gaseous oxygen storage, liquid oxygen storage, and chemical oxygen storage.
While the paper does not go much other than duration, I can think of a few reasons why a chemical system might be preferred. Unlike most emergency applications, where a breathing system is taken from a normal environment (a fire station or emergency vehicle) into the hazard, a mining breathing system has to be kept in the mine, and probably hauled around with the miners.
First, I can’t see a LOX system being storable for any reasonable period of time.
A gas bottle might raise safety issues in a mine, although there are bottles certified for firefighter use.
Chemical is stable, and storable for a long time. Additionally, as shown in Table 1, the chemical system is half the weight of the others, and in some cases a third of the weight. If you’re hauling this around in a mine, this is an issue.
I haven’t seen the technology survey mentioned in the article to judge the issues. Guess what…neither has anyone else who read that article.
And yes, a coal mining company is not in the business of manufacturing safety equipment, any more than a department store has its own factory to build fire extinguishers. They can buy what’s on the market.
I’m seeing a lot of assumptions on motives with very little data to go on. I’d like to think coal mining companies make more money when their miners aren’t being killed and their mines shut down.
W.B. Reeves
Too bad you didn’t make that argument to begin with. What you actually said was:
You were clearly asserting that “consumer preferences” were the driving force behind any failures in workplace safety. Now, of course, you’re attempting to obscure your earlier statement by talking about how complex the issue of workplace safety is, something no one ever disputed. You are the one who attempted to oversimply the question by insinuating that consumers were responsible for the problem.
kshead
I don’t really think anyone expects Mr. Whatzman to be making the safety equipment on an assembly line out back of his office….
…..but could someone at least shoot him an email with the number of the guy that knows where to buy fire extinguishers for the department store? I suspect the department store guy keeps up with the saftey issues better than Mr. Whatzman.
Richard Bottoms
Perhaps. But the usal rightwing argument is something like you commie liberals are just hate captialists and want to shut them down.
What we want really is for industries that are dangerous to take measures to protect their employees even if it costs them an extra penny or two to their shareholders.
The Other Steve
That doesn’t really dispute the point I made that many of these mines were closed from 2002-2004. Plus, did the data differentiate between strip and tunnel mining? If strip mining has increased, that would show a dramatic change in production with limited risk.
You may be right, but I would like the data to prove it… not just your conjecture.
Jess
Can the corporation really be considered a free-market entity? As I understand it (I admit I’m not well versed in economic theory), it’s something that is created by the government, not the market, and functions in large part to “socialize” the negative fall-out of its operations–pollution, workers’ injuries, etc.–by making everyone but its executives and shareholders responsible for dealing with the problem. And then there’s the issue of goverment subsidies and such like. Perhaps if we want the market to manage itself, we need to truly remove the goverment from the mix and cancel all corporate charters, making the individuals that decide to cut corners on worker safety as responsible as the rest of us are when we choose to be negligent and endanger others.
Al Maviva
Other Steve, I don’t know how to access the other thread from a week or two ago where I dumped all that data into comments, and frankly, I don’t feel like going back and duplicating my effort to discuss casualty figures in another comment that you will not bother to read.
You can get coal mining casualty figures here. You can get coal production figures here.
Hopefully the aggregated figures post correctly in tabulated form. Again.
FATAL Total Mined
YR MINERS ITIES (thousand tons)
90 168,625 66 1029
91 158,677 61 996
92 153,128 55 997
93 141,183 47 945
94 143,645 45 1033
95 132,111 47 1033
96 126,451 39 1063
97 126,429 30 1089
98 122,083 29 1117
99 114,489 35 1100
00 108,098 38 1073
01 114,458 42 1127
02 110,966 27 1094
03 104,824 30 1071
04 108,734 28 1115
Make of these figures what you will; I’m confident that you’ll disagree with any conclusions I might draw, no matter what they might be.