Sheltering miners
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Everything else aside, the rescue of 33 miners in Chile has at least accelerated the ripening of a national consensus in China on the imperative need for emergency shelters in our mines.
Yet such calls might seem redundant, as the State Council issued an order in July urging mining enterprises to introduce or complete safety guarantee infrastructures, including emergency shelters. However, only a few had taken it seriously before the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners.
As the country's chief work safety inspector phrased it: The compulsory installation of underground emergency shelters will "speed up".
The Chilean mine accident was an exemplary demonstration of the difference an emergency shelter can make when miners find themselves in harm's way. Without it, the 33 miners would not have survived 69 days, hundreds of meters underground.
Given our economy's heavy reliance on fossil fuels, our mining sectors' poor safety record, and the heavy loss of human life, investing in emergency shelters is a moral imperative worth endorsing and enshrining in law.
Such installations are neither technically complex, nor economically unaffordable. The three years, which the July document grants mining firms to fulfill the task, is obviously too long a wait. An earlier deadline must be considered, so that the promise does not sound hollow.
Meanwhile, the coal mine safety authorities must come up with sensible technical standards, so that such compulsory devices do not become useless equipment put in place to swindle inspectors' eyes.
On the one hand, we must be aware that emergency shelters are not the ultimate panacea that can relieve all our safety concerns. The West Virginia mine in the United States, where 29 miners were killed in an explosion on April 10, was equipped with such a device. Most victims did not even have time to make it to the shelter when disaster struck.
On the other hand, even without such a shelter, the latest tragedy at Pingyu Coal Mine in Henan, which left 37 dead in the pit, could, and should, have been prevented. Twenty-two hours prior to the accident, there was report of gas density exceeding alert levels.
"Increasing safety facilities aside, the tragedy could have been avoided as long as there had been proper respect for operation procedures," says a miner at Pingyu, who has survived two mining disasters.
Like many previous accidents in our mines, such disasters are hardly "natural". Neglect or disregard of safety and due procedures has been a frequent culprit in similar cases.
Unless the popularization of emergency shelters is matched with safety-minded administration, we should not anticipate dramatic improvements in the safety record of our mining sectors.
