Thanks to Joe the night crew is back in the coal. ibid.
The company seems to have worked out how to run consistent coal. ibid.
1954: The daily lives of miners were chronicled by the national coal board’s film unit. Timeshift: When Coal Was King, BBC 2013
Mining Review was shown in over 800 cinemas and watched by millions of people. ibid.
Coal carried many of the hopes of post-war Britain. ibid.
In 1958 alone sixty-two miners loss their lives in pit accidents. ibid.
The 1960s would see a prolonged period of contraction. ibid.
There are now less than a handful of deep coalmines in Britain employing a few thousand people. ibid.
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a miner, Forty-niner,
And his daughter, Clementine. Percy Montrose, song 1884
August 5th 2010: the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is shaken by one of the worst accidents in mining history. 33 miners are buried under some 800,000 tons of rock. Their families rushed to the scene. The government of Chile takes charge and orders 3 ingenious plans to drill into the mountain. No-one in history has survived this deep or this long underground. Chilean Miners: Buried Alive, 2011
They range in age from 19 to 63. ibid.
The mine owners believed their mine to be safe. ibid.
One man recalls a butterfly inside the shaft moments before the cave-in. Two miners who were driving out of the tunnel would have been crushed had they not stopped to look at it. ibid.
Numerous suits are filed against the San Esteban Mining Company. Their assets are seized in order to ensure payments for the rescue effort. ibid.
While the world is concentrated on the 33, the other 250 workers of the San Jose and the San Antonio mines, which have been shut down since the accident, have been out of work for almost 2 months. ibid.
On September 27th the first of the Fenix pods arrives at Camp Hope. ibid.
Up to one billion viewers worldwide watched the twenty-two finale of Chile’s greatest endeavour. ibid.
A miracle beyond imagining: to rescue intact thirty-three human beings who were trapped underground longer than anyone in the history of mining. Against all odds Operation San Lorenzo becomes a symbol of unity, endurance, and faith, and changed Chile and the miners for ever. ibid.
The Atacama Desert, northern Chile: On August 5th 2010 a massive explosion rocked this landscape, and 33 miners were trapped half a mile below. For 17 days the miners have no contact with the world outside. Chilean Miners: 17 Days Buried Alive BBC 2011
The copper mine at San Jose was notorious; it paid higher wages to compensate for a bad safety record. ibid.
No-one was even sure how many men were down the mine. ibid.
The men were expecting to find at least two days’ supply of food as required by mining regulations. Management had once again failed to prepare for an emergency. ibid.
The temperature in the mine was over forty degrees. ibid.
On the third day there was a further collapse. ibid.
The daily prayers were followed by a general meeting at which decisions were taken establishing democracy from the beginning. ibid.
The miners had established daily routines but still had no idea if anyone was even looking for them. ibid.
Their campaign succeeded; soon drills began to appear from all over Chile. ibid.
So on day seventeen the rescuers’ camera found not rubble but the first images of the missing men. They would have to wait another fifty-two days before they could be brought to the surface. ibid.
Privately, they are still haunted by what they lived through. ibid.
We left the counting-house, and ascended the face of the cliff. Then, walked a short distance along the edge, descended a little again, and stopped at a wooden platform built across a deep gully. Here, the miner pulled up a trap-door, and disclosed a perpendicular ladder leading down to a black hole, like the opening of a chimney. ‘This is the shaft; I will go down first, to catch you in case you tumble; follow me and hold tight,’ saying this, our friend squeezed himself through the trap-door, and we went after him as we had been bidden.
The black bole, when we entered it, proved to be not quite so dark as it had appeared from above. Rays of light occasionally penetrated it through chinks in the outer rock. But by the time we had got some little way further down, these rays began to fade. Then, just as we seemed to be lowering ourselves into total darkness, we were desired to stand on a narrow landing-place opposite the ladder, and wait there while the miner went below for a light. He soon re-ascended to us, bringing, not only the light he had promised, but a large lump of damp clay with it. Having lighted our candles he stuck them against the front of our hats with the clay – in order, as he said, to leave both our hands free to us to use as we liked. Thus strangely accoutred, like Solomon Eagles in the Great Plague, with flame on our heads, we resumed the descent of the shaft; and now at last began to penetrate beneath the surface of the earth in good earnest.
The process of getting down the ladders was not very pleasant. They were all quite perpendicular, the rounds were placed at irregular distances, were many of them much worn away, and were slippery with water and copper-ooze. Add to this, the narrowness of the shaft, the dripping wet rock shutting you in, as it were, all round your back and sides against the ladder – the fathomless-looking darkness beneath – the light flaring immediately above you, as if your head was on fire - the voice of the miner below, rumbling away in dull echoes lower and lower into the bowels of the earth – the consciousness that if the rounds of the ladder broke, you might fall down a thousand feet or so of narrow tunnel in a moment – imagine all this, and you may easily realize what are the first impressions produced by a descent into a Cornish mine.
By the time we had got down seventy fathoms, or four hundred and twenty feet of ladders, we stopped at another landing-place, just broad enough to afford standing room for us three. Here, the miner, pointing to an opening yawning horizontally in the rock at one side of us, said that this was the first gallery from the surface; that we had done with the ladders for the present; and that a little climbing and crawling were now to begin ...
We are now four hundred yards out, under the bottom of the sea; and twenty fathoms or a hundred and twenty feet below the sea level. Coast-trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty feet beneath us men are at work, and there are galleries deeper yet, even below that! ...
Two or three causes concur to make us doubt the wisdom of going lower. There is a hot, moist, sickly vapour floating about us, which becomes more oppressive every moment; we are already perspiring at every pore, as we were told we should; and our hands, faces, jackets, and trousers, are all more or less covered with a mixture of mud, tallow, and iron-drippings, which we can feel and smell much more acutely than is exactly desirable. We ask the miner what there is to see lower down. He replies, nothing but men breaking ore with pickaxes; the galleries of the mine are alike, however deep they may go: when you have seen one, you have seen all.
The answer decides us – we determine to get back to the surface. Wilkie Collins, XI: Rambles Beyond Railways: Botallack Mine
Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan’s blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread. Mervyn Peake, Rhondda Valley
Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. Thomas Frank
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn’t mean that America is running out of coal (there’s plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation – the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia. Jeff Goodell
Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry – the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall. Jeff Goodell
Mountaintop removal coal operations enrich only a handful of elites while impoverishing everyone else in their proximity. Gloria Reuben
In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn’t understand why some pop star from London would want to be there. Billy Bragg
The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive than they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the US. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced. Elon Musk
Native people – about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70% of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining. Winona LaDuke
Miner’s Strike is undoubtedly the sort of film we should be doing this year. The Comic Strip Presents ... Strike! David Putnam type at table, Channel 4 1988