Despite the perception portrayed by the intensive news coverage of the Crandall Canyon mine collapse, U professors said mining isn’t an overly hazardous profession, although an increased dependence on coal has led miners into deeper, more dangerous territory.
Even though professors called the Huntington mine cave-in “unique,” they said the actual mine was not very out of the ordinary. Some said the media have made it seem more dangerous than it is.
“The only time mining is in the public eye is when there is an accident,” said assistant professor James Donovan.
Up until the mine collapsed Aug. 6, the mine’s safety record was better than the national average, said professor William Pariseau.
Department of mining engineering chair Kim McCarter said although the mine had been given more than 170 health and safety citations from the Mine Safety and Health Administration since 2005, Crandall Canyon was not on the high-end for citations in mines nationwide, but more in the middle.
McCarter said the bumps and bounces that occur when strained energy is released in mines are a “fairly common phenomenon,” and that it’s not unusual to have five to 10 bumps per day in deep mines, such as Crandall Canyon. In the state of Utah, McCarter said there can be 100 or more of these bumps of different magnitudes each month.
“Not all have the same effect as Crandall Canyon,” McCarter said. “It just happened that people were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Although most professors said it would be unwise to make conjectures before all information has been released, some gave insight into mining methods that might have been used at Crandall Canyon, possibly leading to the collapse.
McCarter, along with Pariseau, said longwall mining and retreat mining were used at the mine in Crandall Canyon. In longwall mining, passageways and entries are created once the walls are mined, leaving only entryways and pillars. In retreat mining, miners move back toward the portal to mine as much as they can from the coal pillars left from the longwall process, while still trying to maintain a stable mine.
Even though Crandall Canyon had permission to use retreat mining — where miners deliberately mine the pillars and allow the roof to collapse — McCarter said he’s not sure if that’s what the miners were doing at the time of the collapse.
“Retreat mining is not dangerous, but it sounds like they may have been mining coal from barrier pillars, which is not common,” Donovan said.
Pariseau said that retreat mining is not unusual, since it can provide money-making resources, but ordinary barrier pillars are usually not mined so they can be in place for additional protection of future longwall panels.
McCarter said mining is not in the top-10 most dangerous professions and that industries such as construction and off-shore fishing have far more injuries.
According to reports by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Donovan said mining injury and fatality rates might seem high, but because fewer people work in mining when compared with occupations such as construction, the data is skewed.
But some professors are increasingly wary of Utah’s deep coal mining practices, brought on by the dependence on coal to generate power for electricity. Deep coal mining is inherently more risky, and soon coal supplies in higher-up mines will be depleted, said Professor Mike Nelson.
“Unless there are significant changes in energy use, people face the choice of allowing people to mine in deeper, which is increasingly the only source of coal in the state,” Nelson said.