Mine Disaster News

This will be a brief entry, because my ten year old monitor cuts off every few minutes now. Until the new one arrives, I'll be forced into pithiness.

Yesterday, I was in the gym and one of those ubiqitous televisions featured an interview with the surviving miner's wife. The interviewers kept asking, "why do you think your husband survived? What was it in his personality that kept him struggling?"
Now, I understand that the people who know this particular man might want to attribute his survival to his inner strength, but I'm sure that the wives and friends of the men who died wouldn't think so. Why were they asking his wife this, anyway? Shouldn't they have had the mine owners and engineers and regulators on to talk about what happened? They are the ones investigating, according to the New York Times,

What caused the explosion, which apparently occurred in a sealed, abandoned part of the mine? What led to the miscommunication that caused the miners' families to believe for three hours that the men had been rescued? Why was one miner, Randal McCloy Jr., able to survive?

Reading about Mr. McCloy sitting there while his friends died just gives me the shivers, and while there are complicated scientific answers to these questions, I'd say the answer to the question of why those men died was simply, "capitalism," or, if you're more liberal social-democratic than socialist, you can call it, "robber baron unregulated capitalism" if you want. Those men died because their lives were cheap to the men who owned the mine. And the men who owned the mine control the regulators. Isn't that the way it always is?
Here's a song by Hazel Dickens about the 1968 disaster in the Mannington Mine, also in West Virginia, which had also received citations for safety violations before the explosion of the mine killed seventy-eight men.:
We read in the paper and the radio tells
Us to to raise our children to be miners as well.
Oh tell them how safe the mines are today
And to be like your daddy, bring home a big pay.

Now don't you believe them, my boy,
That story's a lie.
Remember the disaster at the Mannington mine
Where seventy-eight miners were buried alive,
Because of unsafe conditions your daddy died.

They lure us with money, it sure is a sight.
When you may never live to see the daylight
With your name among the big headlines
Like that awful disaster at the Mannington mine.

So don't you believe them, my boy,
That story's a lie.
Remember the disaster at the Mannington mine
Where seventy-eight miners were buried alive,
Because of unsafe conditions your daddy died.

There's a man in a big house way up on the hill
Far, far from the shacks where the poor miners live.
He's got plenty of money, Lord, everything's fine
And he has forgotten the Mannington mine.
Yes, he has forgotten the Mannington mine.

There is a grave way down in the Mannington mine
There is a grave way down in the Mannington mine.
Oh, what were their last thoughts, what were their cries
As the flames overtook them in the Mannington mine.

So don't you believe them, my boy,
That story's a lie.
Remember the disaster at the Mannington mine
Where seventy-eight good men so uselessly died
Oh, don't follow your daddy to the Mannington mine.

How can God forgive you, you do know what you've done.
You've killed my husband, now you want my son.

(You can hear the song on the record "Coal Mining Women," which I have just found available on itunes. )
That disaster led to massive miner protest and the passage of the Black Lung bill in 1969. More later.