Many Pressures Led to Cave-In

Critics Cite Economics, Lax Safety Rules in Utah Mine Disaster

HUNTINGTON, Utah — In the small hours of Aug. 6, before the mountain came down around six men working to hollow it out, immense forces were concentrated on the far reaches of the Crandall Canyon coal mine. Not all of them came from within the groaning mountain.

Gravity in crushing concert with geology was the immediate problem. For years, miners had ground huge gouges out of the mountain, progressing horizontally a foot at a time. Pressing down on them was a mass of rock extending up more than a third of a mile.
The other pressure was economic. The coal that rattles on conveyor belts out of the hillsides of east-central Utah sold for 50 percent more last year than five years earlier. In Crandall Canyon, the section the mine crew was working Aug. 6 had already been harvested and abandoned by a previous owner. The mine’s new owner sent crews back in to gather more.

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It also shifted the focus here to determining the cause of the collapse, widely believed to be related to the work the men were doing: bringing out the great chunks that held up the mine’s ceiling.

“That’s called ‘free coal,’ ” said Sue Ann Martell, director of the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in nearby Helper.

The vast pillars of coal — often half or more of the coal in a workspace — is also called “pure profit,” because there’s no expense in reaching it. “All you’ve got to do is knock it down and put it in your car,” said Martell. “It’s the cheapest coal you can get.”

The plan to take that coal was approved by the federal agency charged with reducing the human cost of mining, a toll that for decades ran above 2,000 lives a year nationwide. The U.S. Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) also approved the treacherous rescue plan, which ended Thursday with the deaths of three men, including an agency inspector.

The tandem catastrophes ensure that the MSHA will be under intense scrutiny once the long-established etiquette of mine disasters permits public attention to shift from the fate of the trapped men.

Washington Post