Mine Safety Being Improved Again
The U.S. government has tried desperately to make sure that miners remain safe and alive by not getting buried alive or losing oxygen. But sine the accident in Utah it seems that this dream has not gone as well as they hoped. It has been improved, but they are looking at ways to improve it even more.
“The government learned lessons from Sago,” says J. Davitt McAteer, a former official with the US government’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), referring to the mine explosion in West Virginia in which 12 miners perished and one, miraculously, survived. Heralded as the most significant mining legislation in 30 years, the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act, signed into law by President Bush on June 15, 2006, was a result of investigations into the Sago accident.
The three key changes, Mr. McAteer says, are requirements to provide enough oxygen for workers to survive for as long as 50 hours, provide wireless communications, and harden the chambers where miners can await rescue. The general rule is that “if you can keep them alive for 50 hours, we can get to them,” says McAteer, now vice president at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. The six miners now trapped in a Utah coal mine have enough air and water to survive for several days, according to officials at the Crandall Canyon Mine.
McAteer says it appears, because officials have no way to communicate with the trapped miners, that the Crandall Canyon Mine still used the old land-line telephone system. The new legislation called for wireless communications to be developed within three years, so the Crandall Canyon Mine would have been in compliance.
The other most important change called for, according to McAteer, was the hardening of chambers in which miners can hold out during rescue efforts. Those were required in West Virginia but not in the rest of the country.