Murray Needs to Answer…in Court

08/20/2007: …and I’m not talking about lawsuits–although I hope the families of the six miners take his ass to the cleaners.

No…this is a criminal matter. Murray, every engineering firm whose reps signed off on his practice, and even folks at the the Mine Safety and Health Administration who enabled this travesty, need to face the music in crimimal court. There is–at the bare minimum–a prima facie case that they recklessly endangered the lives of miners. A grand jury needs to look into indicting them.

Don’t get me wrong; I realize that mining is an inherently dangerous occupation, and it will not go away in our lifetimes, or even in the next two or three generations. Other than nuclear power–which is so heavily-regulated that no significant plant development has taken place since the Three Mile Island debacle–no other energy source provides the economies of scale that coal does. And the world is full of demand for inexpensive energy, especially here.

That said, an engineer’s first obligation–whether it be civil, electrical, mechanical, industrial, aerospace, or even mining engineering–is to the public safety. Period. Paragraph.

Here’s what Richard Stickler of the MSHA rold FOX News:

No support system currently in existence can withstand the explosive force of a mountain bump because those forces are nearly impossible to predict, Stickler said. Once one coal pillar collapses, the weight it had carried gets transferred to adjacent coal pillars, setting off a chain reaction.

If that is the case, then why did the MSHA and engineering firms allow for the continued mining at Crandall Canyon? There were two collapses in March; where was the MSHA? Why did engineers–and the government–not recommend the shutdown of the mine?

Now these winners are telling us that the miners may never be found. This after the mine owner has spent the last two weeks telling us an earthquake caused the collapse (and ignoring that the mining caused the small earthquake which caused the collapse), and has promised “definitive news” while failing to deliver. 

This should also serve as a wakeup call to the mining industry, government agencies, and–yes–engineers.

While the industry has made great advancements in worker safety–even with last year’s tragedies added in, the number of mine fatalities is dramatically lower in raw and percentage terms over the last 40 years–cases like this serve as evidence that government, mining corporations, and engineering firms can get lax on safety, just as NASA let their guard down and handed us the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

That is why Murray, the MSHA, and relevant engineering firms must be scrutinized in court.

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