5 workers die, 1 escapes Ky. mine blast
Sometime between midnight and 1 AM today, five workers in a coal mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, died in an explosion.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060520/ap_on_re_us/mine_explosion
Harlan County ought to have been regarded as a national tragedy long before this. Like most of southeastern Kentucky, this is a place that virtually is coal mining. Hemmed in by mountains as far as the eye can see, barely connected to the rest of the world by hours of tortuous two-lane roads that are frequently washed out, and run by a few elite families who ensure that the schools, the federal money, the jobs, the roads, and the elections all benefit them and their proteges and no one else. The things that happen in Harlan County are things that I used to believe simply didn't happen in America in the 21st century: vote-buying, corruption, schools where the students never learn to read because teaching jobs are allocated based on political favoritism, people who live indefinitely on government checks because they haven't been given the life skills to reach another way to live. The men work in the coal mines or they don't work, the women teach or stay home, the children plot to leave and they get into trouble and they have babies and they drop out of schools that weren't teaching them anyway.
It resembles a cross between an American inner city and a company-run banana republic. Just as the corruption in Latin American governments was created and perpetuated by the United States' systematic crippling of the countries' power structures, so Big Coal in the early 20th century used force and favoritism to create dependence in its workers. When the major companies stepped out when the profits shrank, the power vacuum was filled by the certain favored local families, who continued to run the county in the same exploitative fashion as their predecessors.
We're at war in Iraq. So oil prices are surging. So demand for coal has rebounded. So there's a sudden demand for mine workers, which can't keep pace with the supply of skilled workers since the coal industry has been shrinking its hiring since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the coal companies, synonymous with power in these counties, have been cutting safety corners with impunity for as long as the industry has existed. And today, May 20, 2006, five men, in a narrow endless underground black tunnel in the middle of the night, died for the same industry they'd been living for.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060520/ap_on_re_us/mine_explosion
Harlan County ought to have been regarded as a national tragedy long before this. Like most of southeastern Kentucky, this is a place that virtually is coal mining. Hemmed in by mountains as far as the eye can see, barely connected to the rest of the world by hours of tortuous two-lane roads that are frequently washed out, and run by a few elite families who ensure that the schools, the federal money, the jobs, the roads, and the elections all benefit them and their proteges and no one else. The things that happen in Harlan County are things that I used to believe simply didn't happen in America in the 21st century: vote-buying, corruption, schools where the students never learn to read because teaching jobs are allocated based on political favoritism, people who live indefinitely on government checks because they haven't been given the life skills to reach another way to live. The men work in the coal mines or they don't work, the women teach or stay home, the children plot to leave and they get into trouble and they have babies and they drop out of schools that weren't teaching them anyway.
It resembles a cross between an American inner city and a company-run banana republic. Just as the corruption in Latin American governments was created and perpetuated by the United States' systematic crippling of the countries' power structures, so Big Coal in the early 20th century used force and favoritism to create dependence in its workers. When the major companies stepped out when the profits shrank, the power vacuum was filled by the certain favored local families, who continued to run the county in the same exploitative fashion as their predecessors.
We're at war in Iraq. So oil prices are surging. So demand for coal has rebounded. So there's a sudden demand for mine workers, which can't keep pace with the supply of skilled workers since the coal industry has been shrinking its hiring since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the coal companies, synonymous with power in these counties, have been cutting safety corners with impunity for as long as the industry has existed. And today, May 20, 2006, five men, in a narrow endless underground black tunnel in the middle of the night, died for the same industry they'd been living for.