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Shafts of Death
by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn - Eat The State
Remember the Quecreek coal mine disaster in Pennsylvania last July? It left 9 miners trapped 300 feet underground in rushing, frigid waters for more than 3 days. Bush rushed from his Crawford Ranch for a photo op with the rescued miners in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, looking for a repeat of his performance at Ground Zero, the crowning moment of his presidency. "What took place here in Pennsylvania really represents the best of our country, what I call the spirit of America," Bush proclaimed. Then he sped off to a $1.5 million Republican fundraiser in Philadelphia. What took place in Quecreek was no "accident," merely lethal normalcy, business-as-usual for the industry in the coal fields of Appalachia, where mine-and-run corporations send their workers down to extract every last yard of coal from dwindling coal seams. The Black Wolf Mining Company, a non-union operation, tried to pin the blame for the disaster on bad maps provided by the state of Pennsylvania, which led the mining crew to drill into the adjacent Saxman mine, abandoned in the 1950s and filled with 60 million gallons of water, which sluiced at 60 miles per hour into the Quecreek mine. But that excuse won't wash. For one thing, officials at the company and federal regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration had been aware since at least 1999 that those maps were dangerously inaccurate. And in the days leading up to the disaster, the miners themselves had warned the company. "The mine was wet from the very beginning," says Ronald Hileman, one of the rescued miners. Hileman testified to Senate investigators that the crew boss had told executives at the mining company about the bad condition at least twice before the collapse.

posted by An Old Curmudgeon 11:05 AM