On Friday, the roof of a tunnel at the Lucky Friday Mine collapsed, trapping 53-year-old Larry “Pete” Marek, a 30-year mining veteran. His brother escaped. his name unkown as of this posting, and wasn't injured. My thoughts go out to him and his family and I hope he is soon discovered.

This issue hits hard for me as I've spent a lot of time on this blog covering mining in Silver Valley. According to the Spokesman, Hecla Mining has been expanding its Lucky Friday Mine in the Silver Valley, spending $200 million in recent years to increase silver production by about 60 percent and extend the mine’s life beyond 2030. In 2009, the company agreed to pay $177,500 in fines for violating federal clean water laws at Lucky Friday. EPA investigators said the mine exceeded discharge levels for metals such as lead, zinc, cadmium and suspended solids between September 2008 and February 2009. Discharges flow into the South Fork Coeur d’Alene River above the town of Mullan

After the jump, check a post I wrote almost exactly a year ago about the Sunshine Fire and how it relates to the incident in West Virginia and mine safety.

“The high cost of energy in America was paid in human lives this week, with the deaths of more than two dozen miners in a massive explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. It’s the worst U.S. mine disaster in four decades.”- Michael Winship at the HuffPo.

If you know your local history, the last disaster Winship is referring to is the Sunshine Mine Fire on May 2, 1972 that killed 91 workers from smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning in Kellogg, Idaho. 83 men were rescued. 81 on May 2…and then two on May 9. The two were Ronald Flory and Tom Wilkinson, who survived eight days underground alive after spending more than a week 4,800 feet down where they found a pocket of fresh air. “We knew they had to come down and get us. We didn’t know how long we would be there or if they would get there before we died,” Flory recounted three years ago. “They had their hope, but after that long they didn’t really expect to find anybody.” (How twisted is this: Flory and Wilkinson and their families were frequently harassed for being survivors. Flory for eating a dead miner‘s lunch, days into hunger.) The Sunshine mine fire was the largest disaster in the mining industry since the 1917 Granite Mountain mine fire in Butte, Montana, which took one hundred and sixty-three lives.

At the time, it took a disaster like that to focus attention on one of the nation’s most scandalous problems: Mine safety. This week’s disaster at Upper Big Branch is the latest in a string of environmental and safety-related problems connected to Massey and Blankenship. The company paid a $20 million fine to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 and pled guilty that same year to safety violations and agreed to $4.2 million in civil penalties and criminal fines connected to the 2006 deaths of several miners in a fire. According to Forbes, “In October 2000 the floor of a 72-acre wastewater reservoir built above an abandoned mine in Kentucky collapsed, sending black sludge through the mine and out into a tributary of the Big Sandy River. The sludge killed fish and plants for 36 miles downstream. Water supplies were shut down in several towns for a month. In total, 230 million gallons spilled out, 20 times the volume of the crude oil from the Exxon Valdez. Lawns nearby were covered in as much as 7 feet of muck…The reservoir had shown signs of leaking right before the accident and Massey failed to report that fact to regulators as required, according to the U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration. The cleanup has cost $58 million so far.”

It’s a cycle. Seven months after the Sunshine Mine Disaster, they reopened. Most workers returned. And plans are underway to reopen Upper Big Branch quickly. It’s not something you can give up easily even when companies put profits before safety and the environment.

(Also, Winship pulls no punches on Massey Energy Company president and CEO Don Blankenship who has been faulted for the Upper Big Branch disaster. Blankenship hates unions, makes fun of climate change, loves mountain-top-removal mining, and shares via Twitter “America doesn’t need Green jobs but Red, White, & Blue ones.” He required a police escort when addressing distraught mining families and a chair was thrown at him.)

 

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