Harlan County Blues

Almost every day in Kentucky, we learn a little more about what killed five Harlan County miners in May. We've learned that cheap foam seals, opposed by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), allowed for a buildup of methane in the mine and may also have been to blame for the explosion at the Sago mine in West Virginia. And we've learned that the seals were improperly built and coated with a sealant that wasn't approved for mine use.

Still, the majority of miners at both Sago and the Darby No. 1 mine in Harlan survived the initial blasts. They died because their self-rescuers held only an hour's worth of oxygen. In the late 1990s the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposed installing more caches of oxygen inside the mines. But the Bush Administration, under former mining executive David Lauriski, withdrew that idea in September 2001, calling it cost-prohibitive. Back in 1997, as general manager of Energy West Mining Company, Lauriski lobbied MSHA to raise fourfold the amount of coal dust allowed in underground mines. Once installed to oversee the agency, he began pushing the proposal again. The irony here is obscene: A man put in charge of enforcing federal mine safety decided to put miners at much greater risk of contracting black lung disease, purely in the name of profit for his former employer.

Another bitter irony is that the thirtieth anniversary DVD of Barbara Kopple's documentary Harlan County U.S.A. was released the same week the Harlan County miners died. The confluence of these events is cause for reflection.

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