2012 April Archive | Coal Tattoo

In this photo taken March 12, 2012, coal miner Joackim Myhrvang gestires in Mine 7, Svalbard, Norway (AP Photo/Scanpix Norway, Berit Roald)

It’s always interesting to see photographs and news stories from the coalfields around the world, like the photo above and like the terrible events described in this short piece from AP out of China:

A Chinese city government says villagers with sickles and clubs protesting against mining activities in the southwest attacked police, killing one officer and injuring 15 others. The Lijiang city government in Yunnan province said late Friday that the violence erupted on Wednesday as villagers were gathered at a township government office to express concern that activities at a coal mine could trigger geological disasters.

Or, this Christian Science Monitor piece out of Mozambique:

On a recent morning in western Mozambique, a group of 500 families in the district of Moatize fed up with Brazilian mining giant Vale do Rio Doce gave up on writing letters to the government and erected blockades instead. They hauled logs across the railroad and piled stones on the highway, halting the flow of Vale’s coal.

The families are among several thousand people displaced by mining activities in the region, recently discovered to hold the world’s largest untapped reserves of coking coal, which is used in steel manufacturing. Vale, they said, had not honored its promises: their new houses had been poorly built, and the area where they were resettled was isolated and unsuited to agriculture.

Doesn’t what happened in this story from Canada sound familiar:

Environment Canada weakened a draft version of regulations to crack down on pollution from coal-fired power plants following pressure from the industry, newly-released federal records have revealed.

Briefing notes prepared by the department in September said the proposed regulations offered the equivalent of an 18-month deferral on enforcement of the regulations “because of the interventions made by ATCO,” an Alberta-based energy company.

The regulations, if finalized, are slated to come into force by July 1, 2015, but ATCO was seeking the deferral “to the end of 2016,” to protect its existing “Battle River 3” generating unit.

“ATCO’s views had an influence on the proposed regulations as published,” said the briefing note, produced a few weeks after Environment Minister Peter Kent unveiled his plan.

A few other examples:

— Chinese workers who are exposed to silica dust in mines, and pottery and gemstone factories suffer not only from respiratory illnesses, but are at higher risk of contracting heart and infectious diseases and cancer, researchers in China have found.

— The three major companies involved in a project aimed at reducing Alberta’s carbon footprint have dropped out, striking a major blow to the province’s efforts to combat fierce international criticism over oil sands emissions, according to this report.

And of course, we know too well this story from New Zealand:

Stuart Mudge dreamed of learning the art of mining on the Pike River coalface.

But it was a passion which ultimately claimed the life of the 31-year-old resident of Runanga, a township 10km northwest from Greymouth.

And as a Royal Commission of Inquiry investigates the cause of the tragedy – as well as a raft of issues relating to the mine’s safety procedures, design and the actions of former management – Mudge’s parents have gone public with an aborted plan to have the mine closed down.

Just weeks before the initial explosion at Pike River on November 19, 2010, a group of Pike River miners and contractors – including Mudge – voiced their shared concerns over the mine at a private barbecue.

“They were all talking about safety at Pike River. Stu said something like, ‘The gas levels are terrible, she is going to blow . . . we should be doing something about it’,” Mudge’s mother, Carol Rose, told the Sunday Star-Times.

Stu’s father, Steve Rose, added: “They said, ‘OK, we will do it. We will go in on Monday morning and shut the mine down.’ “

But the concerned delegation of Pike River miners never made it to the Labour Department.

Steve said that the day following the barbecue, the men realised such a move could end their mining careers. “It was like, ‘S—, we will be blacklisted, we will never get another job in mining, no one will ever touch us,’ ” he said.

In this photo taken Sunday, April 15, 2012, rescuers search for victims of a landslide from a strip coal mine in Thai Nguyen province, Vietnam. An official said the landslide from the coal mine’s dump killed one person and left five others missing and presumed dead in northern Vietnam. (AP Photo/Vietnam News Agency, Thao Nguyen)

There was bad news this week from Vietnam:

Ten houses were buried in a rockslide that occurred in the early morning of April 15, at an earth and rock dump near a coal mine in Thai Nguyen Province, northern Vietnam.

Thousands of cubic meters of earth and rocks suddenly fell onto the ten houses, which were located right beneath the tip where the materials, dug out from the Phan Me coal mine, have been dumped for years. By the end of the day, five people were still buried under rock and soil.

Mr. Ha Van Thang, who luckily got out of danger, says that at around 3am, he and his wife got up to take care of their newly-born pigs. They suddenly heard a big explosion from the mount behind their home. Smoke rose from the nearby transformer station. Seeing rock and waste from the mount falling, he shouted and ran out of the house with his wife and his son.

However, his parents could not get out of the house. His father, Ha Van Xuan, 90, was quickly transported to a hospital and is still alive, but his mother, Vu Thi Hong, 85, was dead because of suffocation.

Meanwhile, there’s been tons of media attention this week about the two-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the most interesting pieces is this op-ed in the New York Times by my buddy Abrahm Lustgarten, a ProPublica reporter and author of the new book, “Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster.” Abrahm observes:

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, an additional $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true that the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

Coal Tattoo readers no doubt remember that the Deepwater Horizon exploded just two weeks after Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine blew up, killing 29 miners in the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in nearly 40 years. The criminal investigation of the individuals responsible for Upper Big Branch continues, and there are some hopeful signs that U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin and his team might — perhaps for the first time in coalfield history — really move up the corporate ladder here. But prosecutors have also had setbacks, and the recent revelations about MSHA (see here and here) could be trouble for the government in future cases. Stay tuned.

Earlier this week, we blogged about a WyoFile story regarding how Wyoming and some other jurisdictions continue to spend money intended for abandoned coal-mine cleanups on other things. And thanks to our friend Sam Petsonk for pointing out this similar piece in the Wall Street Journal:

When the University of Wyoming needed an extra $10 million for renovations to its basketball arena last month, state legislators turned to an unlikely source: a federal fund for cleaning up abandoned coal mines.

The fund was set up to pay for things like sealing up old mine shafts and dealing with collapsed tunnels and abandoned surface mines. But, as allowed under law, the university plans to use the money to fix up its Arena-Auditorium, where its Cowboys play, providing an exterior face lift and rotating the court 90 degrees.

Meanwhile, the New York Times had this interesting story from Oregon:

A new link in the world’s future energy supply could soon be built here on the Columbia River, and it would have nothing to do with the vast acres of wind turbines or the mammoth hydroelectric dams that give this region’s power sources one of the cleanest carbon footprints in the nation.

Instead, Boardman is pursuing one of the oldest and dirtiest of fossil fuels: coal. The question is not whether to use it to produce new energy but whether to make what some say would be tainted new profits.

Even as coal-fired power plants are being phased out in Oregon and Washington, Boardman, an agribusiness outpost across the river from vineyards owned by the Columbia Crest winery and where the Department of Energy recently awarded $25 million to an innovative biofuel producer, is among at least half a dozen ports in the region weighing whether to ship millions of tons of coal to Asia from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana.

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