Many a mud-spattered pickup truck in Western
mining communities sports a bumper sticker that reads, “Behind
every light switch is a coal miner.” After the Crandall
Canyon mine collapsed in central Utah on Aug. 6, the slogan took on
a slightly different meaning for the anxiously watching American
public: Behind just about every light switch, people are risking
their lives daily in a dark and dangerous world.
Trapped
some 1,500 feet underground were six miners, maybe alive, maybe
dead. Rescuers tunneled slowly through the unstable mountain, which
shifted and groaned so much one wonders why it was being mined in
the first place. Rigs drilled into the mountain from above, sending
cameras down in hopes of a glimpse of the missing. Meanwhile, the
scene on the surface was one of hope and despair. And it often
devolved into farce.
Robert Murray, the mine’s co-owner,
appointed himself spokesman for the effort. He has a history of
blasting as un-American people who want more safety regulations for
mines. Murray claimed that an earthquake caused the collapse,
despite what seismologists said (the collapse itself actually
triggered a quake); and he insisted that the miners hadn’t been
doing retreat mining, an especially dangerous method of extracting
coal, even though the Mining Safety and Health Administration –
MSHA – has strong evidence that they were.
He might have
been better off simply trumpeting his Utah mine’s past safety
record. In recent years, MSHA has cited Crandall Canyon
approximately 80 times a year for safety violations. The mine
reported one fatality and 61 injuries during the last decade, and
MSHA slapped it with $264,025 in fines. These numbers may sound
like an indictment, but in fact, they are almost all below the
national average. Which begs the question: If a relatively safe
mine can trap and bury six miners and then kill three rescuers –
including one MSHA official, who had deemed the Crandall Canyon
mine safe just months earlier – and injure six others, what does
that say about coal mining in general?
Forty-seven miners
died last year in the United States while scooping approximately 1
billion tons of coal out of the earth, half of it in the West.
(Compare that to a decade ago: Seven percent less coal was mined,
dozens more mine safety inspectors were on the job, and fewer
people died.) All that coal was then loaded into 7 billion railroad
cars, shipped across counties or states or regions and burned to
generate about half the electricity in the nation. Meanwhile,
profits flowed for big companies like Peabody ($600 million in
2006) and Arch Coal ($260 million in 2006).
Taken on a
energy-unit-produced to fatality basis, coal mining has a better
record than, say, the Iraq war. But that doesn’t do much to ease
the pain of the family and friends of the miners and rescuers lost
in Utah this August. For them, behind every light switch is a
husband, father or son, dead before his time.
Wild, wild horses, we just can’t drag them away.
That’s the tune officials are singing lately at Sheldon National
Wildlife Refuge in northern Nevada. The refuge has periodically
rounded up wild horses and put them up for adoption to reduce the
herd, which it says is overgrazing the refuge and damaging
wetlands, meadows and riparian areas. The current herd numbers
about 1,600, which is about 10 times the number in earlier
management objectives. Officials had hoped to continue the roundups
and to introduce contraceptives to keep numbers down.
But
wild/feral horse lovers are a passionate bunch, and after they got
Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.V., on their side, they were able to put the
kibosh on the roundups, at least for now. The horses will roam free
while the refuge reworks an environmental analysis of its options.
Meanwhile, environmentalists worry that the horses are
chomping away the habitat of native species like pronghorn antelope
and sage grouse.
Biofuel boondoggle? 918 million
Annual biofuel refinery
capacity in the West, in gallons (once current projects are
completed). 55
Factor by
which petroleum refinery capacity in the West exceeds this amount. 202 million
Gallons of
biodiesel that could be produced annually from all the waste
vegetable oil in the West. 0.7
Percent of annual gasoline consumption in the West this
could replace. 50 cents
U.S.
tax credit for a gallon of biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil. $1
Tax credit for a gallon
of biodiesel made from virgin oil. 70.7
Millions of acres of corn that
would be required to replace all gasoline used in the West
gallon-for-gallon with ethanol. 70.2
Millions of acres of cropland in the West. 75
Ears of corn required to provide
the ethanol in the E85 fuel for a 10-mile trip in a Mercedes-Benz
C230 flex-fuel sport sedan. 3.6
Large ears of sweet corn required to provide enough
calories to fuel a 10-mile trip by bicycle.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Two weeks in the West.
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