No one told me to do it. No one could have told me to do it.
September 28, 2024 3:14 PM Subscribe
The Canary. If you haven't heard about Chris Mark, that's natural because he recently won a Sammie, an award for unsung public service heroes. Chris Mark toiled away unsupervised for decades in an obscure government agency investigating the causes of coal mining collapses. His work resulted in the setting of practical standards that would eliminate mine-collapse deaths in the US and internationally. This essay is a tribute but it is also a wonderful construction in its own right. Author Michael Lewis is at the top of his form. We learn about the structural secrets of Gothic cathedrals, how coal mines are like chocolate sponge cakes, the role of the ball peen hammer in saving lives, the path of a son who ends up following his father and the son all but denies it.
Hat tip to Long Reads (30 min read)
"At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.) Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job — roughly 50,000 people — had been killed by falling roofs. "
"But the problem was complicated. It didn’t frame itself as a single problem but thousands of smaller ones. Each mine was sufficiently different from every other mine that regulators felt compelled to devise rules specific to it, almost as if each mine were its own little industry. The deeper the mine, for example, the heavier the weight over its roof, and the more support it would require. Rock itself differed from mine to mine in diabolical ways, so there was no reliable way to measure the load the pillars needed to support. “A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.” There was a reason no one could agree on coal pillar formulas: No one could agree how to measure the rock the pillars needed to support."
"If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives, it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to. Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t. It had been a race to the bottom, and until Chris created his database and made his study, no one had really noticed what had happened. If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings, here was a road map. Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring. But someone had noticed."
"He didn’t say much more, and I set it aside and returned to a list of questions I had about government service. How had he felt on the several occasions the federal government was shut down and he was sent home without pay? (He’d secretly kept working and even gone into mines.) What were his feelings in 1995 when Newt Gingrich closed the Bureau of Mines and his little mine safety unit had been the only one spared? (“Any bureaucracy once it exists will continue to grow absent exogenous forces. I never heard someone say I wish so-and-so at the Bureau of Mines was still here,” Chris said.)"
"At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.) Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job — roughly 50,000 people — had been killed by falling roofs. "
"But the problem was complicated. It didn’t frame itself as a single problem but thousands of smaller ones. Each mine was sufficiently different from every other mine that regulators felt compelled to devise rules specific to it, almost as if each mine were its own little industry. The deeper the mine, for example, the heavier the weight over its roof, and the more support it would require. Rock itself differed from mine to mine in diabolical ways, so there was no reliable way to measure the load the pillars needed to support. “A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.” There was a reason no one could agree on coal pillar formulas: No one could agree how to measure the rock the pillars needed to support."
"If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives, it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to. Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t. It had been a race to the bottom, and until Chris created his database and made his study, no one had really noticed what had happened. If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings, here was a road map. Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring. But someone had noticed."
"He didn’t say much more, and I set it aside and returned to a list of questions I had about government service. How had he felt on the several occasions the federal government was shut down and he was sent home without pay? (He’d secretly kept working and even gone into mines.) What were his feelings in 1995 when Newt Gingrich closed the Bureau of Mines and his little mine safety unit had been the only one spared? (“Any bureaucracy once it exists will continue to grow absent exogenous forces. I never heard someone say I wish so-and-so at the Bureau of Mines was still here,” Chris said.)"
This is excellent writing about excellent work.
posted by mhoye at 3:26 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 3:26 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
How did this not come up as a thing we discussed Previously?
posted by k3ninho at 3:35 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
posted by k3ninho at 3:35 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
The other post used a URL shortener. Guessing it also happens a lot with archive links when the post doesn't include the original link as well.
posted by trig at 3:38 PM on September 28
posted by trig at 3:38 PM on September 28
Ah, right. Pony request then.
On topic: Michael Lewis can write, and here's a story and then some.
posted by k3ninho at 3:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
On topic: Michael Lewis can write, and here's a story and then some.
posted by k3ninho at 3:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Also, the other post is pretty old, and it wouldn't've come up in the list of posts that used the same tag.
posted by box at 4:12 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
posted by box at 4:12 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Every day has felt like a decade this month, but it's still only from September 3...
posted by trig at 4:58 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
posted by trig at 4:58 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
"The plates pushing against each other directly below West Virginia create a stress running from east to west."
This refers to tectonic plates. What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
posted by mollweide at 5:32 PM on September 28
This refers to tectonic plates. What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
posted by mollweide at 5:32 PM on September 28
« Older I think I'm starting to peak now, Al
posted by storybored at 3:19 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]