A mine is a terrible thing to waste

It’s dangerous, I know, but I have been doing some thinking about that mine disaster in Huntington, Utah, which seems to grow worse by the day. Several attempts to find the trapped miners have failed. On Friday, the rescuers themselves were trapped and three were killed.

The cave-in that killed the rescuers was believed to be caused by what seismologists call a "mountain bump," in which shifting ground forces chunks of rock from the walls. Seismologists say such a bump caused the August 6 cave-in that trapped the six men more than 3 miles inside the central Utah mine.

Three miles. Think about something that is three miles away and imagine a hole in the ground that deep. In the planetary sense, it’s a pock mark, but in human terms it is massive.

There are three things in life that you have to respect: The Ocean, anything beneath the Earth and Jäegermeister. Any one of them can kill you. The earth heaves and shakes, and if you’re under it chipping anthracite when it happens, it will crush you like a grape. And for what, exactly? To get something we burn to make something that makes other things burn.
Coal mining in the United States dates back to 1748, and it’s one of the few occupations that has not technologically advanced from those days. Take a rail car, go down there and blast it out, just like great-great-grandpa did. For instance, why is it that in this age of technology the only way to communicate with the trapped miners or find them is to drill another hole in the ground?

Mining an odd process to me, and one that I figured we would have technologically outgrown by now. Without getting into the science, common sense tells me that we have a constant, burning source of continual energy in our sky every day, and one would think that a few great minds would have by now figured out a way to tap into that energy and keep people from digging holes, drilling holes and otherwise endangering their lives so that the great industrial complex could continue to prosper. The great industrial complex should be smart enough to figure out another way to survive.

For now and the foreseeable future, we will keep digging and every time people die doing it, we mourn them and accept it as though they died in a car accident or something that is preventable, but the earth, like the Ocean, really doesn’t want us in there. It shakes and rattles uncontrollably and unpredictably, and I think we should be more frightened of it than we appear to be. The governor said he doesn’t want any more rescue operations unless the Mine Safety and Health Administration can guarantee that they will be done safely. How can they guarantee that? One seismologist said that “the mountain is collapsing in slow motion.” That doesn’t sound safe to me.

It has been 10 days since the cave in, and one wonders whether there could be any hope of finding the miners alive. Society however, needs their closure, and it will be interesting to see whether the rescue efforts will continue or they will be left down there as a permanent monument to the mining industry. In the battle between humans and the elements, the elements almost always win.

Coal mining seems like
a really old way to get
some really old stuff.

Haiku’s are old, too,
and easier than mining.
Plus, they can’t kill me.