Idle Thoughts

The Pike River Mine Disaster: Your part in their deaths

Most people would have watched the unfolding Pike River mine disaster on their 42-inch plasma TVs, and expressed their sympathy for the miner’s families under the glare of their house lighting.

Here lies the obvious, yet unspoken, irony: the very setting where most people have seen the worst parts of coal mining is powered by that very coal, hewn from the ground at the risk of miners’ lives. Yet I doubt many would have given a thought - certainly the media has yet to make the link between the demand for coal and accidents - to the human cost of their electricity.

More so than almost every other type of mining, underground coal mining carries unique risks, due the presence of explosive methane generated by the same geological processes that produce the coal itself. Even a cursory examination of the history of coal mining leaves no doubt as to the number of lives that have been lost, and the on-going risks in this type of mining.

• Felling Mine Disaster, UK, 1812 - 91 lives lost
• Blantyre Mining Disaster, Scotland, 1877 - 207 lives lost
• Mount Kembla Mine Disaster, NSW, 1902 - 96 lives lost
• Mount Mulligan Mine Disaster, QLD, 1921 - 75 lives lost
• Pretoria Pit Disaster, UK, 1910 - 344 lives lost
• Ashley Deep Pit Disaster, UK, 1874 - 54 lives lost
• Kianga Mining Disaster, QLD, Australia, 1975 - 13 lives lost
• Moura No.4 explosion, QLD, Australia, 1986 - 12 lives lost
• Gretley Colliery accident, NSW, Australia, 1997 - 4 lives lost
• Moura No.2 explosion, Australia, 1994 - 11 lives lost
• Jim Walters Resources Mine Disaster, USA, 2001 - 13 lives lost
• Sago Mine Disaster, USA, 2006 - 12 lives lost

Or to look at it another way, in NSW between 1990 and 1999, 33 lives were lost in coal mining, out of a total workforce of 14,687. That, for those without a calculator, is a fatality rate of 1 in 445. In no other industry would such a statistic be tolerated.

And to this morbid list, we can now add the 29 lives lost in Pike River.

This is the cost of coal mining.

Electricity is perhaps the most abstract commodity[1]. We plug our devices into the funny shaped holes in the wall; they work; some months later we get a bill for this. Perhaps even more so than the meat industry, in the mind of the consumer, the final product is far removed from the means of its production.

In NSW, over 90% of electricity is generated [PDF] from coal-fired power plants, burning a mix of open-cut and underground mined coal. This is the reality of of the electricity that powers your fridge, your television and your laptop: its production requires that people risk their very lives. We don’t think of this day-to-day, instead preferring to assume that the socket in the wall is consequence free - free of environmental consequences, and free of human consequences. On both counts, this is manifestly untrue.

If you want to pay respects to the miners lost in Pike River, and their families, perhaps the best thing you could do is to call your electricity provider, and switch to one of the Green Energy plans they have. That’s a small step towards a future where no lives are lost mining coal.

[1] Until, at least, you have used your body to conduct it.