In a further demonstration of how coal mining inevitably leads to accidents and deaths, an explosion in Russia has killed 12 miners and trapped 83 more.
This is within two months of serious accidents in China and the United States.
These deaths are yet another hidden cost of coal, not borne by the people who use the energy that is generated from it.
“It is hard to imagine a workplace more dismal and dangerous than a seventeenth-century coal mine. Dark, damp, cramped, and chilly, the mines had ceilings that could collapse on your head, air that could smother you, poison you, or explode in your face, and water that could rush in and drown you or trap you forever. Coal mining was one of the few occupations in which a person faced a very real risk of death by all four classical elements – earth, air, fire, and water. It was probably the most dangerous profession of a dangerous time, vivid and literal proof of the depths to which a society would sink for fuel. One moralist of an earlier century concluded that the need to send people to work in such horrid places was itself evidence that God was punishing humanity for the original sin.”
Freese, Barbara. Coal: A Human History. p.47 (hardcover)
What a great quote in that first comment.
I’d like to hear you say more about why you think such accidents are inevitable. Is it simply the nature of the work (in which case, is all mining equally as dangerous) or is there something about our apparently insatiable desire for cheap energy that leads us to look the other way when energy companies drop safety standards?
Russia coal mine search suspended
The search for 24 people still missing following gas explosions at a mine in Siberia has been suspended because of fears of further blasts.
Officials said the concentration of methane in the mine was rising and that fires were burning deep underground.
The death toll from the explosions has risen to 66, the Russian emergencies ministry said.
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