Editorial: All OK at K2

January opened with a dozen miners’ deaths stemming from a too-little, too-late response to an explosion at the Sago underground coal mine in West Virginia. But the month closed with Canadian miners successfully fighting a major fire at the K2 underground potash mine in Saskatchewan and showing their Yankee cousins how to do a mine rescue right.

The K1 and K2 mining complex is owned by New York-listed fertilizer giant Mosaic (MOS-N), which is based in the Minneapolis, Minn. suburb of Plymouth. In 2004, Mosaic’s predecessor companies, IMC Global and Cargill Crop Nutrition, together produced more potash than any other company. In fiscal 2005, Mosaic’s potash business contributed US$228 million in operating earnings on revenues of US$860 million.

Situated near the town of Esterhazy, Sask., 210 km northeast of Regina, the K1 and K2 complex is the world’s largest underground potash mine, boasting an astonishing 4,800 km of tunnels over a 19 by 29-km area. Plans are to expand the complex to an annual capacity of 4.2 million tonnes by the end of this year.

Mosaic and provincial government investigators now believe the recent fire was set accidentally in the small hours of January 29 by a worker using a cutting torch to remove bolts from a flange connected to some polyethylene pipe, the inside of which then ignited.

By 2:30 a.m., the K2 workings had filled with dense, vile, black smoke from the smouldering polyethylene pipe, trapping 72 workers underground — 41 Mosaic employees and 31 Dynatec (DY-T) contract workers.

Following their safety training, all the workers calmly made their way to six nearby sealed refuge stations that were provisioned with nourishment, cots, communications equipment and — most importantly — a 36-hour supply of fresh air.

It wasn’t a bad way to sit out an emergency, and many of the trapped miners were even able to speak with worried family members at surface, almost a kilometre above, to reassure them that they were alive and in good spirits.

Meanwhile, firefighting and mine-rescue crews from the K1 and K2 mine and from a neighbouring mine of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan sprung into action. At first it was difficult to actually find the fire amid the dense smoke, as the polyethylene piping burned like a fuse, keeping the fire on the move.

But the fire was extinguished, and most of the miners were back at surface 26 hours later. Within a few more hours, all were at surface, a little shaken but unharmed.

Cleaning and maintenance crews have since been busy at K1 and K2, and the mine is set to reopen in early February. With the implementation of a few new safety rules having to do with cutting torches, it will soon be business as usual in Esterhazy.

Compare this happy ending with what’s going in the coal industry south of the border. Including the Sago disaster that we detailed four weeks ago, that saw eleven men with one-hour breathing apparatuses found dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning 41 hours after a methane explosion, 19 coal miners have been killed in the first five weeks of 2006, compared with 22 coal miners killed nationwide for all of 2005. (Last year was the safest year ever for American miners, with 57 fatalities in all.)

Last month in West Virginia’s Logan County, two underground coal miners died in a fire that broke out in a belt line at Massey Energy’s Alma no. 1 mine. In the state’s Boone County, an underground miner was killed when a wall collapsed at Long Branch Energy’s no. 18 Tunnel mine.

The rash of coal-miner deaths prompted West Virginia governor Joe Manchin III to briefly halt coal mining in the state until all the mines could be inspected.

Across America, coal miners were asked to spend an hour on February 6 reviewing safety procedures.

The federal Labor Department and the Mine Safety & Health Administration (MSHA) both suggest that West Virginia’s coal miners have just hit a spell of bad luck and that, when measured in decades, there’s a broad downward trend in accidents.

However, critics contend that the MSHA has become too cozy with mine owners, and has been either slow to enforce mine-safety rules or has actively worked to weaken them — especially since 2001, when mine-safety policies were substantially changed.

The most obvious safety improvements the MSHA could make would be to take a lesson from Canada and rebuild mine-rescue teams at all mines and mandate the construction of underground refuge stations at more mines (U.S. coal mines have been largely exempt from building them for their workers). Or, at least provide more caches of oxygen tanks.

U.S. mineworkers could also benefit from greater use of personal emergency devices, or PEDs, that send and receive text messages underground, and are more commonly used in Canada and Australia.

Furthermore, we note that almost all the recent coal-mine deaths in the U.S. have occured at non-unionized mines.

At Sago, some miners are now reaching out to the United Mine Workers of America, and have asked the union to be their representative in the ongoing accident investigation.

Showing its harsh side, the owners of the Sago mine, International Coal Group (ICO-N), tried unsuccessfully — first with its on-site security force and then in court — to block UMWA representatives from entering the Sago mine along with other investigators looking into the cause of the accident.

While we haven’t particularly noticed that safety levels at Canadian mines differ depending on whether or not they’re union shops, the arrival of the UMWA on the doorstep of non-unionized mines of West Virginia’s coal fields may be just the thing to better focus the minds of regulators and companies on their primary responsibility: safeguarding workers’ lives.