Prayers for the Brave Men in the Mine
Few Americans think much about energy costs in terms of human lives. For most, it is a pocketbook issue. But the deaths of the 12 West Virginia miners last week provided a stark reminder that energy extraction is still a dirty and dangerous endeavor. In China, thousands of workers die in coal mines each year--more than 6,000 in 2003 alone. The calculation there, according to one statistician, is 12 lives for every 1 million tons of coal mined. Mining is much safer in America, which recorded only 22 fatal coal mine accidents last year, despite the more than 1 billion tons of coal mined.
Cheap and plentiful coal fills more than half of America's electricity needs. Coal boosters have long touted the nation's vast unmined coal seams as a substitute for high-priced and politically unpalatable Saudi oil. Western strip mines offer even cheaper (although less energy-rich) coal. New scrubbers on power plants and other "clean coal"technologies promise to help even the "dirtiest" underground Appalachian coal make it to market. Amazingly, coal liquefaction could eventually turn cars into coal burners, too.
But the heartbreaking deaths in West Virginia remind us that making coal America's permanent energy solution comes at a price beyond that registered on a utility bill. The environmental costs are well known. Coal-fired plants are the largest source of mercury pollution in the country. The work, while much safer than it was a century ago, also continues to take lives, particularly in the serpentine mines like the one near Tallmansville, where those 12 men will never return to their homes and families.
Today, the prayers sent heavenward outside the simple Baptist church may seem futile to the friends and loved ones so cruelly deceived by the false hope of rescue. If there was any consolation, however, it may have come in the form of the scribbled notes of some of the doomed men who met their end not only with courage but, it seems, in peace. "It wasn't bad," Martin Toler Jr. wrote in a brief farewell note to his family. "I just went to sleep." At the bottom, he concluded simply: "I love you."
This story appears in the January 16, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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