Word: coal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many risks and too little inspection in the coal mines...
Lillie Hamilton can look out the back window of her boxy clapboard house in Mink Branch, Ky., and see the family business, a small coal mine burrowed into the hillside. One chill morning last month, seven men-including three of her sons and a grandson-were wedged 700 ft. down a narrow tunnel, crawling on their knees and blasting loose great chunks of bituminous coal with an explosive gel. Suddenly, a monstrous explosion shattered the Appalachian quiet. The Joyce Ann shaft (named for a Hamilton widow) had become a quarter-mile-long cannon, and the men inside fodder...
...past decade, the annual death count in coal mining, the country's most dangerous industrial occupation, has dropped to fewer than 200, down from 1,000 or more a year in the 1940s. The improvement came from both technological advances and more stringent standards enforced by the Government since 1973. But now the trend has taken a troubling upswing: mine mishaps killed 106 men in 1978, 133 in 1980 and 155 last year. The Mink Branch disaster was one of seven major Kentucky mining accidents in seven weeks; since the first of the year, 31 U.S. coal miners have...
...miners' advocates, from United Mine Workers officials to Congressmen who represent the impoverished Appalachian valleys, what is going wrong is the Government's system of policing. There are at least 250 fewer federal mine enforcement officials than in 1978, yet hundreds of new mines to oversee. In coal-rich Logan County, W. Va., for instance, the local Mine Safety and Health Administration inspection staff has dropped from 33 to eleven, and of the county's 91 mines due to receive a quarterly inspection last spring, only 62 were visited. U.M.W. Safety Officer Donald Fleming detects a more...
This forbidding continent has lately become more than the testing ground for explorers in mukluks and wooden sledges. It is being eyed acutely for mineral wealth, once deemed far too difficult and expensive to mine. Geologists have already confirmed that it holds great quantities of iron and coal, including perhaps the world's largest coal field, running more than 1,500 miles along the Transantarctic Mountains. There are strong indications of other treasures as well. More than 200 million years ago, before the world's continents began their slow drift apart, Antarctica was attached to South America, Africa...