Wednesday, January 04, 2006

sad, today, such sad news. i hope the focus tho, does not linger on the awful miscommunication and instead finds the reasons behind this terrible accident. s

1 comment:

John said...

Quite. For the real reasons, read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article this morning on Wilbur Ross, the financier who controls International Coal Group, which owns the mine.

Ross is the same guy who put together the International Steel Group, which bought LTV, Bethlehem, and Weirton Steel; cut retiree health care and other benefits from the workers; dumped the pension liabilities on the public through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; and then sold the company to Lakshmi Mittal (an Indian firm) for $4.5 billion.

He's trying to do the same in coal. Most of the mines owned by International Coal -- including this one -- are non-union and therefore have poor safety records. It's pretty gross, but International Coal is now peddling the line that the health record was "improving" under their management as compared to Aker, the bankrupt operator they bought this past November.

The question, of course, is Why was this thing operational in the first place, if it had so many outstanding safety violations? That's a question for both Wilbur Ross and George Bush's Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is supposed to protect mineworkers. I'm going to guess that they will never have to answer that question, but I think I know the answer already, and it's an answer as old as those West Virginia hills: the mine was in operation because it was profitable for a lot of people who never had to go underground to die.