The Next Page: Mine safety science: born in Pittsburgh
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NOV. 1, 1911. At the mouth of an experimental mine in the South Hills the day after the initial blast.
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Two hundred sixty-five miles separate Bruceton and Montcoal, W. Va. Near enough to drive but distant enough to call the drive long.
Bruceton is Pittsburgh's South Hills headquarters of the National Energy Technology Laboratory and home to the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health's Pittsburgh Research Laboratory, both descendants of the United States Bureau of Mines. Montcoal is the site of the West Virginia coal mine explosion that claimed the lives of 29 men in early April.
The two places have little in common except for mutual recognition of the fact that coal mining is a dangerous endeavor. At Bruceton the fact is a matter of scientific inquiry. At Montcoal it is a matter of painful reality.
For both places, the problem is persistent, stubborn and old.
Two thousand years ago, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about miners being killed by poison gas. Fifteen hundred years later, Georgius Agricola wrote about men being buried alive by cave-ins, killed and maimed by stagnant air, falls from ladders, and drowning in mine sumps.
Two hundred years ago, the industrial revolution made the situation worse, thanks to the advent of the steam engine which increased demand for coal, and the invention of high explosives which made extracting coal easier.
PDFIn the last seven decades of the 19th century, coal production in the United States increased more than a thousand-fold, from 240 thousand tons in 1829, to 253 million tons in 1899. Not unpredictably, mine injuries and fatalities increased too.
Despite Pennsylvania's enactment of the nation's first mine safety law in 1869, mine safety proved to be stubbornly elusive. Increased production in combination with ignorance of the principles of safe mining resulted in more injuries and deaths year after year.
Then in 1897, the situation deteriorated further when miner compensation was altered to reflect "run of mine" or total mine output.
Prior to that time, miners were paid for the quantity of broken coal they produced. With the new method, they were paid by the total amount of coal produced by the entire mine. Since minershad the incentive to produce more unbroken coal, they used larger explosive charges, which produced the desired effect -- more coal.
Unfortunately, they also produced more mine explosions.
Despite intermittent efforts to establish a federal mine safety agency, the problem was left to the states until 1907 by which time an average of nine men a day were dying in mine accidents in the United States. On June 10 of that year, the secretary of the interior assigned the task of improving mine safety to the Technological Branch of the U.S. Geological Survey. Due to legal concerns about federal infringement of states' rights, the mandate was limited to the federal territories of Oklahoma and New Mexico.
First Published May 16, 2010 12:00 am
