No one told me to do it. No one could have told me to do it.
September 28, 2024 3:14 PM Subscribe
The Canary. If you haven't heard about Chris Mark, that's natural because he recently won a Sammie, an award for unsung public service heroes. Chris Mark toiled away unsupervised for decades in an obscure government agency investigating the causes of coal mining collapses. His work resulted in the setting of practical standards that would eliminate mine-collapse deaths in the US and internationally. This essay is a tribute but it is also a wonderful construction in its own right. Author Michael Lewis is at the top of his form. We learn about the structural secrets of Gothic cathedrals, how coal mines are like chocolate sponge cakes, the role of the ball peen hammer in saving lives, the path of a son who ends up following his father and the son all but denies it.
Hat tip to Long Reads (30 min read)
"At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.) Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job — roughly 50,000 people — had been killed by falling roofs. "
"But the problem was complicated. It didn’t frame itself as a single problem but thousands of smaller ones. Each mine was sufficiently different from every other mine that regulators felt compelled to devise rules specific to it, almost as if each mine were its own little industry. The deeper the mine, for example, the heavier the weight over its roof, and the more support it would require. Rock itself differed from mine to mine in diabolical ways, so there was no reliable way to measure the load the pillars needed to support. “A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.” There was a reason no one could agree on coal pillar formulas: No one could agree how to measure the rock the pillars needed to support."
"If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives, it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to. Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t. It had been a race to the bottom, and until Chris created his database and made his study, no one had really noticed what had happened. If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings, here was a road map. Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring. But someone had noticed."
"He didn’t say much more, and I set it aside and returned to a list of questions I had about government service. How had he felt on the several occasions the federal government was shut down and he was sent home without pay? (He’d secretly kept working and even gone into mines.) What were his feelings in 1995 when Newt Gingrich closed the Bureau of Mines and his little mine safety unit had been the only one spared? (“Any bureaucracy once it exists will continue to grow absent exogenous forces. I never heard someone say I wish so-and-so at the Bureau of Mines was still here,” Chris said.)"
"At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.) Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job — roughly 50,000 people — had been killed by falling roofs. "
"But the problem was complicated. It didn’t frame itself as a single problem but thousands of smaller ones. Each mine was sufficiently different from every other mine that regulators felt compelled to devise rules specific to it, almost as if each mine were its own little industry. The deeper the mine, for example, the heavier the weight over its roof, and the more support it would require. Rock itself differed from mine to mine in diabolical ways, so there was no reliable way to measure the load the pillars needed to support. “A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.” There was a reason no one could agree on coal pillar formulas: No one could agree how to measure the rock the pillars needed to support."
"If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives, it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to. Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t. It had been a race to the bottom, and until Chris created his database and made his study, no one had really noticed what had happened. If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings, here was a road map. Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring. But someone had noticed."
"He didn’t say much more, and I set it aside and returned to a list of questions I had about government service. How had he felt on the several occasions the federal government was shut down and he was sent home without pay? (He’d secretly kept working and even gone into mines.) What were his feelings in 1995 when Newt Gingrich closed the Bureau of Mines and his little mine safety unit had been the only one spared? (“Any bureaucracy once it exists will continue to grow absent exogenous forces. I never heard someone say I wish so-and-so at the Bureau of Mines was still here,” Chris said.)"
This is excellent writing about excellent work.
posted by mhoye at 3:26 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 3:26 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
How did this not come up as a thing we discussed Previously?
posted by k3ninho at 3:35 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
posted by k3ninho at 3:35 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]
The other post used a URL shortener. Guessing it also happens a lot with archive links when the post doesn't include the original link as well.
posted by trig at 3:38 PM on September 28
posted by trig at 3:38 PM on September 28
Ah, right. Pony request then.
On topic: Michael Lewis can write, and here's a story and then some.
posted by k3ninho at 3:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
On topic: Michael Lewis can write, and here's a story and then some.
posted by k3ninho at 3:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Also, the other post is pretty old, and it wouldn't've come up in the list of posts that used the same tag.
posted by box at 4:12 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
posted by box at 4:12 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Every day has felt like a decade this month, but it's still only from September 3...
posted by trig at 4:58 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
posted by trig at 4:58 PM on September 28 [3 favorites]
"The plates pushing against each other directly below West Virginia create a stress running from east to west."
This refers to tectonic plates. What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
posted by mollweide at 5:32 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
This refers to tectonic plates. What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
posted by mollweide at 5:32 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
I would assume this isn't quite right and the stress is in fact stored in the rock from when the mountains were formed, a few hundred million years ago when there was an interface between two plates underneath.
posted by ssg at 8:41 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
I would assume this isn't quite right and the stress is in fact stored in the rock from when the mountains were formed, a few hundred million years ago when there was an interface between two plates underneath.
posted by ssg at 8:41 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
There's also the fact that the mountains themselves cause stresses that result in faults because of their weight pressing down on the surrounding crust. These faults are often the cause of eastern US earthquakes. I assume the direction of that stress is determined by the underlying geological structures that caused the mountains to form in the first place, so it probably gets back to the origin of the Appalachians anyway. I'm just a dilettante geographer, not a geologist, but the phrase in the original article really leapt out at me.
posted by mollweide at 9:26 PM on September 28
posted by mollweide at 9:26 PM on September 28
The Springhill Mining Disaster is a song of my childhood - it brings my dad to tears every time he sings it.
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In roads that never saw sun nor sky
In the town of Springhill, you don't sleep easy
Often the earth will tremble and roll
When the earth is restless, miners die
Bone and blood is the price of coal
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Late in the year of fifty-eight
The day still comes and the sun still shines
But it’s dark as the grave in the Cumberland mine
Down at the coal face, miners working
Rattle of the belt and the cutter's blade
Rumble of the rock and the walls closed round
Living and the dead men two miles down
Twelve men lay two miles from the pitshaft
Twelve men lay in the dark and sang
Long hot days in the miners tomb
It was three feet high and a hundred long
Three days past and the lamps gave out
And Caleb Rushton got up and and said
We've no more water, or light, or bread
So we'll live on song and hope instead
Twelve days passed and some were rescued
Leaving the dead to lie alone
Thru all their days they dug their grave
Two miles of earth for a marking stone
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:48 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In roads that never saw sun nor sky
In the town of Springhill, you don't sleep easy
Often the earth will tremble and roll
When the earth is restless, miners die
Bone and blood is the price of coal
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Late in the year of fifty-eight
The day still comes and the sun still shines
But it’s dark as the grave in the Cumberland mine
Down at the coal face, miners working
Rattle of the belt and the cutter's blade
Rumble of the rock and the walls closed round
Living and the dead men two miles down
Twelve men lay two miles from the pitshaft
Twelve men lay in the dark and sang
Long hot days in the miners tomb
It was three feet high and a hundred long
Three days past and the lamps gave out
And Caleb Rushton got up and and said
We've no more water, or light, or bread
So we'll live on song and hope instead
Twelve days passed and some were rescued
Leaving the dead to lie alone
Thru all their days they dug their grave
Two miles of earth for a marking stone
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:48 PM on September 28 [4 favorites]
What plate boundaries are directly below West Virginia?
Answering seriously, it was the Laurentian plate and the Amazonian plate, forming the Appalachians in the Grenville oregeny. Or at least that's what 10 seconds of googling and a couple minutes on Wikipedia tells me. (and yes that writer is taking some rhetorical license there; it's famously what he does)
posted by intermod at 9:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Answering seriously, it was the Laurentian plate and the Amazonian plate, forming the Appalachians in the Grenville oregeny. Or at least that's what 10 seconds of googling and a couple minutes on Wikipedia tells me. (and yes that writer is taking some rhetorical license there; it's famously what he does)
posted by intermod at 9:51 PM on September 28 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Yep, URL shorteners break the doubles checker, and that's what happened here. Looks like Brandon deleted the earlier one accidentally, instead of this one, so I've undeleted that ... and also, the shortened address (maybe a gift url?) seems to avoid the paywall/subscribe-to-read blocker I'm getting on this one.
Yeah so maybe this once we'll just let it ride and have both the posts coexist ... let the unsung hero be sung twice this time. A little a capella canary music.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:59 PM on September 28 [10 favorites]
Yeah so maybe this once we'll just let it ride and have both the posts coexist ... let the unsung hero be sung twice this time. A little a capella canary music.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:59 PM on September 28 [10 favorites]
Thanks, storybored. Storyveryinvolving!
posted by dmh at 1:08 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
posted by dmh at 1:08 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
It's a great article, and I'm sort of in awe of anyone that can carve out a space for themselves in a bureaucracy to get things like this done. The implication of an active plate boundary under West Virginia just really threw me off. Ah, well, there's always John McPhee for that sort of stuff.
posted by mollweide at 9:14 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
posted by mollweide at 9:14 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]
Excellent article, thanks for sharing.
posted by fridgebuzz at 10:02 AM on September 29
posted by fridgebuzz at 10:02 AM on September 29
The whole series has been well worth reading. As a fellow federal civil servant (by no means on their level whatsoever), I also really appreciate the whole intent the Post is going for here. We really do care about what we do! And I’m quite sure none of them were probably super keen on being recognized either.
posted by zap rowsdower at 12:54 PM on September 29 [2 favorites]
posted by zap rowsdower at 12:54 PM on September 29 [2 favorites]
Excellent article. As a former federal public servant (in Australia), I know there are lots of people like Chris working away on intractable problems and, as long as they're allowed to continue to do so, coming up with solutions. The so-called 'modern public service' that has been the goal of government here for decades, though, constantly seeks out such people and sends them home with a measly redundancy payment and a pat on the back. People like Chris are largely a remnant of days gone by, though, when the public service had the resources to work on big, long-term problems rather than being restricted to what can be done within one election cycle.
posted by dg at 8:31 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]
posted by dg at 8:31 PM on September 29 [1 favorite]
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posted by storybored at 3:19 PM on September 28 [2 favorites]