Slow death at Sago

Every minute counts when it comes to mine rescue.

That’s why questions are being raised as to why there was such a long delay in activating rescue crews to respond to the explosion on January 2 at the underground Sago coal mine in West Virginia’s Upshur County.

The explosion and resulting release of toxic carbon monoxide left twelve men dead and a thirteenth clinging to life. And in a cruel twist broadcast across America, families were mistakenly told for three hours that the miners had all been found alive.

The Sago mine is owned and operated by Kentucky-based International Coal Group (ICG). With about 1,900 employees, ICG operates ten coal-mining complexes in the northern and central Appalachia and one more in the Illinois basin.

With billionaire Wilbur Ross acting as its driving force, ICG has become the Kinross Gold of U.S. coal, having cobbled together over the past two years a motley assemblage of mostly second-tier coal assets totalling 613 million tons in reserves.

ICG had just celebrated its US$231-million initial public offering in early December, but, tellingly, shares have been tanking on the New York Stock Exchange ever since, dropping to a new low of US$8.72 after the accident.

The Sago mine opened in 1999 under a previous operator, but it was closed during the 2002-03 period before reopening in 2004.

In 2005, mostly under IGC operatorship, Sago had 208 alleged violations of federal mine rules, which is high for a mine of its size but not outrageously so.

In terms of injury rates, the picture was darker, with Sago’s numbers hitting three times the national average in 2005, though the mine had never suffered a fatality until this year’s calamity.

The explosion happened at 6:30 a.m. on the Monday. The non-unionized miners were working on a state holiday, and the mine had been idle the preceding two days.

It appears that a mined-out section, perpendicular to the main workings and sealed off with concrete only four weeks earlier, provided a space for methane to accumulate to dangerous levels.

However, it’s not yet clear if the explosion was ignited by the miners, by faulty machinery underground or by a lighting storm that was raging overhead at the time.

The explosion occurred between two mining crews that had just started their workday. While one miner appears to have been killed directly by the explosion, the crew closest to the portal scrambled out of the mine on foot.

The doomed twelve-man crew on the other side of the explosion donned their breathing gear (giving them an hour or so of oxygen) and retreated to a production face in the deepest part of the mine, 2.6 miles from the portal. There, they built a rough barricade using a ventilation curtain to try to keep out the smoke and carbon monoxide. Then they sat and waited to be rescued, even though no wall of debris actually blocked their exit from the mine.

With the mine workings filled with toxic gas, rescuers first sent a robot into the mine, but its progress was hampered by some foot-level debris. They also drilled holes into the mine where the men were thought to be at the time of the blast. They lowered cameras through the holes, but saw nothing.

The rescue teams — heroes in our books for exposing themselves to risks of secondary explosions, toxic gases and roof cave-ins to help their fellow miners — finally found the twelve miners 41 hours later, after eleven had slowly died of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

The sole survivor, Randal McCloy Jr., was also the youngest, which may have contributed to his staying power. At the time of writing, he remains in a coma in a Pittsburgh hospital, likely with brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

Handwritten notes by the deceased miners reveal a few had survived ten hours after the explosion.

Some of the notes were absolutely heartbreaking. Section foreman Martin Toler Jr., 51, wrote to his family in a deteriorating script, “Tell all — I see them on the other side. It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep. I love you.”

Scandalously, there was no mine-rescue team on-site, and Sago’s managers had to wait hours for teams to arrive from other mines — a process slowed even more by rescuers being off on holidays.

The closest federal rescue team, which had also lost members due to attrition, was 70 miles away in Morgantown and required several more hours to deploy.

As a result, it was more than eleven hours after the explosion that rescue teams first entered the mine.

But IGC was not breaking any laws at Sago: while coal mining companies in the U.S. are required to maintain rescue teams, they are not required to be on-site if a contracted team can make it to the mine within two hours.

As a result, while each coal mine in the U.S. is required to have two rescue teams on standby, in reality there is only one rescue team for every four U.S. underground coal mines. West Virginia, with its 14,000 coal miners, has only 35 rescue teams on record, or about one for every four coal mines.

The Mine Rescue Command Center set up at Sago in the hours after the explosion consisted of company management, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the West Virginia State Department of Mine Health and Safety Training.

Upon his later visit to the stricken town, West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV said family members of the deceased had privately told him of an “inertia” in the Rescue Command Center, and they “felt that everyone was waiting for everyone else to make a move.”

At least ICG has set up a charity for the dead miners’ families, named the Sago Mine Fund. ICG kicked in the first US$2 million, and competitor Massey Energy added US$250,000. Contributions can be made by phoning 1-800-811-0441 or 1-212-826-2174, or by mailing a cheque to the fund at P.O. Box 1510, New York, N.Y. 10150.

(In an interview on ABC Primetime, the billionaire IGC chairman Wilbur Ross admitted he hadn’t put a single dollar of his own money into the fund, and was waiting to see what came in from the outside before making a move. The interviewer pointedly asked Ross if he believed this behaviour was not “cheap.”)

ICG is also trying to find temporary jobs for the 145 Sago employees at other ICG operations.

The Sago mine deaths are the worst mining accident in the state since the late 1960s, when 78 miners died in Marion County, not far from Sago. Those deaths led to the passing of the comprehensive Federal Coal Mine Safety Act in 1969.

Mining in the U.S. remains an inherently dangerous job, but it’s still safer than logging, fishing, piloting a plane, or working structural steel. According to the MSHA, there were 22 fatalities in the nation’s 1,500 coal mines in 2005. From 1900 through 2004, there were 104,552 fatalities in U.S. coal mines, with most occurring in the first half of the twentieth century.

West Virginia has just announced an investigation into mine safety at Sago, with Governor Joe Manchin appointing Davitt McAteer to lead the investigative committee. McAteer was head of the MSHA during the Clinton administration.

In Washington, the Senate will hold a hearing on the Sago accident on January 19 before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The primary issues the investigations will need to delve into are the sorry state of mine-rescue preparedness in the U.S., and how to fix the situation quickly.

If mine-rescue policies in the U.S. are substantively improved as a result, then the lives of those twelve miners at Sago won’t have been taken completely in vain.