Bob Murray, owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine, whose collapse has now entombed 6 miners will NOT testify before a Congressional hearing on the collapse.

Robert Murray, owner of the Crandall Canyon mine, announced yesterday that he would lay off nearly 300 workers at another Utah mine "until (he) can make it safe."

Finally!  Mr. Murray has seen the light!  This tragic circumstance has convinced him that the safety of the workers who make him his millions is actually important!  Eh, not so much.  Amazingly, he blamed Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. for the lay-off.  Oh, and just to make sure he covered all the bases, he also blames a newspaper and Senator Ted Kennedy!

In the meeting to announce the layoffs, Simms said, Murray lambasted Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. for the criticism he has lobbed at Murray and his mining operation. He also criticized The Salt Lake Tribune for its coverage. Murray also railed against Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has asked for federal documents related to the Crandall Canyon mine.

more after the jump...

Don't hear too many folk comin' to old man Murray's defense round these parts.  Funny, that.  Woulda seemed like a perfect time for them righty folks to finally explain once n' fer all what they're on about.

A rumble a loud crack, like thunder, rocks, dirt and chocking dust rain down.
A rock fall is imminent. So what is a miner to do?
"You run for your life," said Tim Miller, who toiled in Kentucky's mines for more than two decades.

He made him ride in the heights of the earth
that he might eat the produce of the fields
He made him draw honey from the rock
and oil from the flinty rock

• Deuteronomy 32:13, from the song of Moses

On August 6, 2007, there was a massive cave in at the Crandall Coal Mine in Huntington, Utah.
Disaster Chronology, 8.16.07, to the present:  http://www.sltrib.com/...
Names of the original lost six miners:
Kerry Allred
Brandon Phillips
Luis Hernandez
Manuel Sanchez
Don Erickson
Juan Carlos Payan

At this moment, rescuers are still trying desperately to reach the trapped miners.  The 172 miners.

Chinese emergency teams are searching for 172 miners trapped in a flooded coal mine, state media has reported.

Officials told Xinhua news agency the workers have only a slim chance of survival in the mine, in Xintai city 450km (280 miles) south of Beijing.

Should these men be recovered, it will not only be a cause for celebration, it will be a big exception to the usual course of events in China's coal mines.  More than four thousand miners lost their lives in China last year.  And the year before that.  And the year before that.

Despite regulations that say otherwise, mine safety in China is laughable.  Mines are poorly mapped, if they're mapped at all, and just as poorly planned.  Underground mines run out under thin, incompetent roof material, leading to collapse or flood.  Mining is done using the old blast and shoot method, often with homemade dynamite.  There's no roof bolting.  Little or no ventilation.  The results of inspections are decided through bribery.  

The miracle in China?  That they don't kill more people this way.

The huge losses in life for those mining in China in no way relieves the pain and frustration we feel for the families of the six men still trapped in the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, or for the three men who died on Thursday trying to save them.  However, the scale of the relative disasters does dramatically show the difference between a mining industry watched over by a safety organization (even one deliberately weakened by an administration that hates safety regulations) and one controlled by nothing more than the greed of the market.

Before you go to work in an underground mine in the US, you are required to go through a course of training on mine safety.  It's not a long course.  Most of the time, it takes about half a day.  Miners are taught about the gear the carry, including how to unpack and use the "self rescuer" each miner carries on their belt.  This small box opens to produce what looks like a World War II-era gas mask.  It doesn't actually produce oxygen, but it will chemically remove excess carbon monoxide -- generated when there is a mine fire or explosion -- from the air.  It works... for a few minutes.  The self rescuer isn't really designed to get the miner safely to the surface, only to get them to one of many caches of oxygen stored at regular intervals through the mine.  The miner is also taught to recognize the reflective tags left throughout the mine, all of which are designed to lead the miner to fresh air, and eventually to escape.

When I took this training (two decades ago), the last step was to watch a film.  This film wasn't one of those 50s-style workplace safety snoozers.  This was a film made of footage taken from previous mine disasters.  It was, without a doubt, the most frightening film I've ever seen, not just because I was about to face those same dangers, but because the film showed exactly what happened to the people in those disasters.  The bodies of miners caught underground during a mine explosion were as burned and shredded as if they had working in the barrel of a cannon when it went off.

Despite all those warnings, once you're actually in the mine it's easy to get complacent.  The working area of most mines is well lit.  The walls are not black as you might expect.  Instead, walls ceiling and floor are all coated with "rock dust," usually powdered limestone, sprayed there to reduce risk of fire and gas explosion.  In a good mine, the working environment is well lit, well ventilated, and so coated with rock dust that it can seem like working in a stucco-coated hallway.  Rattling conveyor belts give the place the feel of a factory.  In many mines, the traditional tracks and vehicles have given way to small diesel pickups that zip back and forth along the mains hauling both miners and equipment.

Separating the active and inactive areas of the mine are barriers made with heavy plastic sheets, concrete blocks, and metal doors.  These are designed to keep the air (driven into the mine by enormous fans) circulating through the working areas in the proper pattern to clear any gases from the face and ensure the miners have clear air.  

Step through one of those heavy metal doors, and you're in another world.

There, away from all the moving people, conveyor belts, and mining machines, it's very quiet.  Quiet enough that you can hear the hiss of water and gas being squeezed from the coal.  Quiet enough to hear the coal groaning under the weight of hundreds of feet of rock.

In those older areas, roof bolts can become so loose that they fall to the floor.  If the bolts are longer the the height of the mine, which happens often, they can slip down to form an odd forest of metal poles, with the boards that should be on the ceiling lying on the floor and the far end of the bolt still loosely inserted into the opening in the roof.  

Corners of the pillars spall off, rounding the edges of each "block."  Pillars slump at the side, piling up loose coal.  The illusion generated by the rock dust is exposed.  The walls are black, glistening damp, and soft.

In many mines, the miners never see this face of the place where they work.  Inspectors still prowl through some of these areas, checking for the build up of methane.  But for the most part, these areas of the mine are done.  Unless, that is, someone decides it would be advantageous to return to one of these old areas and remove some of the remaining coal.

I spent a year working for the National Speleological Society, crawling through spots that were far, far smaller than any place I ever went in the worst underground mine.  But those caves had a feeling of permanence, the air of a place that had been carved out over millions of years through the slow action of running water.  As I squirmed past tracks left in still damp mud by sabertoothed cats and passed the bones of ancient sloths, I had little doubt those places would still be there when I was not even a memory.  I never had that feeling in a mine.  There are only mines that have already collapsed, and those that will.

The only thing that makes underground mining worth contemplating is constant, consistent, tough inspections by an MSHA that's allowed to levy fines that seriously wound any company that dares to risk its workers.  In the case of Murray, his Illinois mine alone had 2,787 violations in just the last two years.  In what kind of universe is a mine with so many violations allowed to keep operating?  This one, apparently.  MSHA, even weakened as it has been, proposed more than $2 million dollars in fines for those violations, but Murray has paid only a quarter of that amount.  That's typical over the last six years, as MSHA has grown more lax about both levying and collecting fines.

Of course, the real price of operating these mines without proper safety isn't measured in dollars.  The real cost is what's been so horribly illustrated 1,800' below Utah over the last week.

The next time you get a chance to talk to a presidential candidate, ask them what they're going to do about MSHA.

Section 76-5-206(1) of the Utah Criminal Code states as follows

homicide constitutes negligent homicide if the actor, acting with criminal negligence, causes the death of another

.

And Robert Murray should be charged with 9 counts of criminally negligent homicide.

The Crandall Canyon disaster was not an accident.  The situation makes a tidy exemplum of "governance" under the Republican worldview: corrupt, hyperpoliticized, knee-jerk anti-regulatory, and "pro-business" to the extent of risking of human life.  So a little story, which I urge you to pass on -- especially to friends who aren't already on "our side" of the issues:

It's been more than a week since the cave in at the Utah mine and still no sign of the 6 workers that are trapped. While the story in the MSM continues to be the slim hope of rescuing the workers, new stories are coming to light concerning how the mine owner Bob Murray used his political connections to threaten Mine Safety and Health Adminitration with their jobs for reporting safety violations.

According to FEC records, Murray Energy Corp. owner, Robert Murray, has donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to Republican congressional candidates and Republican campaign organizations over the last few years.

This man hires illegal aliens to put them to work in unsafe life threatening conditions.  He has a long term opposition to unions and federal mine safety regulations.

Examine the Republicans listed below and check out their voting records on mine safety, unionization and illegal immigration.  

First I want to thank thisisnotanexit for first addressing the Chao-McConnell connection to Robert Murray and his corrupt mining operations in an August 7 diary.

The purpose of this diary is not to be repetitive (although some details will be duplicated) but to provide a fuller picture of how a marriage comprised of a Senator and a Cabinet official can be an ominous weapon in the arsenal of those who would make an end run around representative democracy.

Global warming is killing the conifers of the Sierra. The US Geological Survey, after tracking tree mortality over two decades in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, has concluded that Sierra forests are “sensitive to temperature-driven increases in drought, making them vulnerable to extensive die-back during otherwise normal periods of reduced precipitation.”

Of course that’s just the view of reputable scientists. The screeching howler monkeys of the right will no doubt furiously fling alternative explanations. Sunspots. “Natural cyclical die-off.” God’s wrath. Liberals.

Liberals . . . yeah . . . that's it. For while liberals supposedly seek to save trees, in fact they act to kill them. Just as liberals who purport to protect miners, really work to bury them. And liberals who supposedly support the troops, strive, in truth, and ceaselessly, to abandon them.

We have entered the post-Enlightenment age. Sense has been overthrown: nonsense sits upon the throne. Come over the fold, and see.  

In Collapse Is Latest Fight for Coal's Best Friend, the Washington Post gave front-page prominence to Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy which co-owns the Crandall Canyon mine where rescue workers desperately seek to rescue the trapped miners.

Murray has coal in his blood and has worked his way up the ladder to be CEO (and owner) of a $260+ million/year corporation.  

And, he is a battler, sadly for the wrong causes.

NOTE Look for Energize America's YK2007 presentation in annotated form in the coming days. All discussions will be first posted to the EA2020 website, starting tomorrow, and we encourage comments / discussion there as well.

There's lots of coverage:  If you've had your TV on, you couldn't miss Robert Murray, the mine president, making his peculiar statements.  He's understandably distressed:  even if he doesn't care about the miners, he'll see the family-owned company's profits take a nose dive.  RenaRF wrote a good diary about how strange he is:  that and about all his Republican campaign donations.

And he keeps talking about the collapse being caused by the seismic activity, rather than vice versa.  Nevermind that the evidence doesn't fit his version of the story.  Me, I'm inclined towards the evidence, and so this from the New York Times yesterday is disheartening news:

Efforts to reach six trapped coal miners came to a crawl on Tuesday as continued seismic activity forced out rescue teams, and drilling equipment began slowly chewing through thousands of feet of rock to where the men were working early Monday when parts of the mountain shook and fell.

Deep underground, the mine is continuing to collapse.

While browsing FDL I came across this story Coal Mine Disaster: An Act of God, But NEVER an Act of Greedy Corporations

It gives a good background of the disaster that is Bob Murray. However the real gem was the link to a story from The Pump Handle which is an occupational safety and health blog which bills itself as A water cooler for the public health crowd.

Robert E. Murray the owner of the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah where the miners are trapped exemplifies the stereotype of a Republican business owner from the most conservative state in the union. From the statements broadcast I wonder why anyone in their right mind would risk their lives to work for him. After the Sago mine disaster in West Virginia last year the Government wanted to review the safety procedures at mines across the country. Mr. Murray was upset that the government would interfere with the operations at his mine. Why would any person in his position resent the scrutiny of his operations in the light of the failure in West Virginia?

I am listening in bewildered awe to Bob Murray, the owner of the mine which collapsed trapping 6 miners underground in Utah, give a "press conference" describing the current rescue efforts.  Murray is a well-known opponent of mine safety regulations - see RenaF's excellent diary from yesterday raising the question of whether this guy is a nutcase -
http://www.dailykos.com/...

What I see is a throwback to the days of Andrew Carnegie, when industrialists owned not just their companies, but effectively their workers so long as there was no union to represent the workers' interests.  This guy, running a non-union mine, is controlling everything, and his behavior and language, as well as the collapse itself, raise serious questions of the role of both the Federal government in protecting mine safety, and of the state of Utah.  It's hard to think of a clearer argument for unionization than this.   Follow me below for more thoughts.

As awful as the fate of the four coal miners trapped underground in Utah is, the sad truth is that they represent merely a fraction of the casualties of America's addiction to coal.

Every year in America, pollution from coal fired power plants cuts short the lives of more than 30,000 people and causes millions of asthma attacks, according to government consultants Abt Associates. It's also responsible for retarding the mental development of thousands of American children: according to EPA scientists, more than one in six children born every year have elevated levels of mercury in their blood, putting them at risk for developmental disorders and slower brain growth.

Worst of all, coal is driving the global climate crisis that is putting billions of people at risk from more extreme weather, spreading infectious disease, and disastrous flooding (not to mention threatening thousands of species with extinction).