Three die, 2 missing in Kentucky coal mine blast.

[NNadir]

HOLMES MILL, Ky. - An explosion in an eastern Kentucky coal mine killed three miners and left two other workers missing, a federal mine safety official said Saturday. The blast at the Darby Mine No. 1 in Harlan County occurred between midnight and 1 a.m. while a maintenance shift was on duty, said Amy Louviere, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The three dead miners were found by rescue workers, she said. One other miner was able to walk out of the mine, but two were missing, she said.

Louviere said she didn't know how many workers were on duty when the blast occurred, but no production was going on at the time. Mine rescue teams went into the mine around 3 a.m. and found the dead miners, she said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060520/ap_on_re_us/mine_explosion

[kitkatrose]

1. Ah hell.

:( I hope the ones that are missing come out alive, although hope is probably pretty slim.

I have a question though. I know that coal mining isn't the world's safest profession, but has there been an increase in accidents, or just reporting? It seems like a lot of these have been happening in a relatively short period of time. :(

[NNadir]

2. Coal mining deaths were falling for most of the last century in the US.

Part of the reason is the rise of strip mining, mountain removal, and the use of heavy equipment, which reduced mining in tunnels, which is inherently less dangerous to miners, but not to people who must deal with the legacy of the mining holes and the destroyed waterways.

Another part of the reason, though, was better regulation. Anyone who thinks that the Bush administration regulates anything is at this point crazy. The recent rise in US deaths is almost certainly attributable to the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration.

The use of coal, of course, is as dangerous as ever. It is the most dangerous fuel known, followed closely by the use of oil. No other form of energy compares to these two forms of energy in risk and loss of life and property. It's not even close. Global climate change is just icing on the death cake.

The number of people killed in coal mining operations overseas, particularly China, the Ukraine and other places, dwarfs still dwarfs the number of people killed in coal mining accidents here.

My political raison d'etre has been reduced to railing against fossil fuels. To my mind, this single political issue dwarfs all others.

What I find remarkable and tragic is that nobody cares. Sniffing the fumes, collectively the world's brains seem to have rotted with respect to this issue. There is little left to do now but weep.

[depakid]

4. "What I find remarkable and tragic is that nobody cares"

More and more people do care, they've just not been educated. Coal has been around for 100's of years, so people assume its fairly safe largely because they're "familiar" with it, and in some ways it's taken on a certain "mythos." Think "coal miner's daughter."

That coal mining is a dangerous and abomonable job- associated with poverty and corporate abuse (not to mention "black lung diseases") is less on the nation's conscience today reflects the trends in many occupational areas.

Score 1 for the corporate media and their allies on the far right.

Yet it's not that way in other countries, and that gives some cause for hope. Back in the 1980's for instance, people still burned coal in their fireplaces! I remember staying with a couple in rural wales and being amused/appalled with a brass bucket full of anthracite. You could walk through some of towns and smell the stench- it was almost like roofs were being tarred. Less than 20 years later- and no one burns coal anymore.

Eventually, I hope to see a similar transformation on the industrial scale here.

[NNadir]

5. I suspect what actually happened in Wales was that the North Sea

natural gas became readily available and cheap.

I actually don't believe it was environmental consciousness. People were literally dropping dead in the streets of London from coal pollution in 1952. If, as you say, people were still burning coal indoors in the UK thirty years later, the environmental consequences seem not to have registered.

You can find lots of people who will rail for the rest of their lives about Chernobyl. I had to keep kicking this recent thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=43122

You say "Chernobyl" and everyone acts as if it is the end of the world.

In the case of the miners here, so far as I'm aware, it was never reported in the media if they ever even found the bodies.

[NNadir]

3. Cause of Death Infuriates Miner's Families.

HOLMES MILL, Ky. - Autopsy findings indicating that three of five eastern Kentucky coal miners killed in an explosion died of carbon monoxide poisoning infuriated several family members still mourning their deaths.

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The three men likely survived the initial blast but then died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Harlan County Coroner Philip Bianchi said Sunday based on preliminary autopsy results. The other two died from multiple blunt force trauma and heat injuries, probably because they were closer to the blast, he said.

Many family members recalled the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia. The January blast killed one miner, then spread carbon monoxide that slowly asphyxiated 11 others. Questions have since been raised about whether the Sago miners' air packs functioned properly.

"What they told me was when they found my husband, he had the rescuer on, and he was trying to get out," said Tilda Thomas, whose husband, 53-year-old Paris, was one of the miners who died of carbon monoxide poisoning Saturday.

Mary Middleton's 35-year-old husband, Roy, survived the initial blast but also died from the poisoned air.

"It makes me upset that he smothered to death," she said. "They need to have more oxygen for them..."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060522/ap_on_re_us/mine_explosion

I guess we can attribute at least some of these deaths to poor mining oversight.