King Coal: Willing To Kill For Kilowatts

When a suicide bomber blows a half dozen of our soldiers into smithereens, Americans get understandably outraged. And here at home, when a deranged malcontent goes postal and guns down classmates or co-workers, we call it a massacre.

But if you kill nine men for the sake of keeping the juice flowing through America's veins, well, evidently, we're so addicted to cheap energy that we're willing to write off dead coal miners as collateral damage. What looks like manslaughter, if not outright murder, is handled as some sort of infraction. The penance? A pittance. Not enough to make much of a dent in King Coal's deep pockets. As the AFP reports:

Two federal reports released on Thursday reveal previously unknown details about the August 6th disaster. Now we know, for example, that the sheer force of the collapse probably killed the six workers who were trapped in the mine pretty quickly. So, they were probably dead long before three rescue workers died 10 days later trying to save them.

It all adds up to nine needless deaths, because the reports also make it excruciatingly clear that the mine's operator, Genwal Resources, had to know that it was risking its workers' lives. One of the reports found that Genwal had ignored warning signs that the mine was unsafe, and concealed dangerous conditions from the MSHA:

Ah, but the other report--this one from the Labor Department--sticks Stickler's own agency with some of the blame, finding that the MSHA never should have approved Genwal's mining plan in the first place, and failed to take full control of the rescue operation following the collapse. As Nelda Erickson, whose husband Don was killed in the August 6th collapse, told the New York Times:

Terry Byrge, whose son-in-law, Brandon Kimber, was one of the rescue workers who died, told the Times:

What we've got here is a government agency and a corporation who shared the mindset that a miner's life has less value than the coal that lies so deep that you're courting disaster to extract it.

If there is any silver lining to this black tragedy, it's the news that the Crandall Canyon catastrophe has apparently got the coal industry thinking twice about playing Russian roulette with the lives of its miners. As the AP reported on Friday:

Well, hallelujah. But why did nine men have to die before a coal company concluded that it's not worth the risk? Oh, and if you're looking for anything resembling remorse or an admission of responsibility from Genwal, guess again. The company issued the following statement in response to the federal reports:

Genwal's preferred scapegoat was that old goat Himself--God. Genwal's owner, Bob Murray, insisted that the collapse was caused by an earthquake, and declared that "the mountain is alive. It's a deadly mountain..."

Bob Murray owns nineteen mining operations. He's got an abysmal safety record, as Utah blogger Bob Higgins noted on the Wasatch Watcher, citing a March report from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the August 6th disaster:

Oh, but guess what? Bob Murray's given a big chunk of change to Republican politicians over the years, too. Higgins sums the whole story up better than I could:

The Senate committee's report concluded:

A Congressional investigation in May concurred, stating that:

And Americas need to mourn the deaths of our miners as much as we mourn the loss of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, they're all fighting for the same thing--you know, the battle to feed our carbon cravings.