President Obama Offers Condolences to WV Miners’ Families, Vows to Get Answers on What Went Wrong

I appreciate that Obama believes in the usefulness of the federal government, however this issue would be best served if the federal government kept out of the situation and let the city, state and coal companies investigate the catastrophe to find out what went wrong at the mine and come up with local solutions on how to prevent other accidents.
Regardless of how grievous a tragedy, unless there are national implications, the federal government should let the local and state officials handle the investigation, unless they don’t have the resources or the expertise to full investigate the problem.

The fault is that digging coal is a potentially hazardous activity and always will be. Currently coal miners make a good living-the economic benefits will continue to attract people to work in the mines.It could be worse-look at China.

If Obama cared for the miners of America, he could show it by supporting them and their cause and the mining industry, and not making it his drama as usual.

Every accident is preventable!
Every automobile accident is the fault of the driver!
Either from the way they are operating the vehicle, the lack of attention to road conditions, the lack of attention to other vehicles, the way they maintained their vehicle, or the choice of the equipment they selected.
The problem with the premises of the article is that it misses the point. The governmental fault lies not with safety rules and enforcement rather with the failure of the Federal government to support technology advancement in an industry critical to national security in the same way it supports almost every industry from milk to medicine to oil.
In 1996 the US Bureau of Mines was disbanded under the “Contract with America” with the assistance of the Clinton/Gore Administration’s “Reinventing Government” crusade. Unlike every other key industry, coal mining has been left to itself to fight international completive pressures, increasing regulation, and lobbying pressure from the petroleum industry to switch power generation to natural gas.
The last vestige of any attempt to encourage mining technology died under Bush/Chaney when the single mine related “Industries for the Future” project in the Department of Energy was canceled and its single staff reassigned.
Now environmentalists are trying to force an end to surface mining in favor, they say to underground mining. Yet one of the reasons for the coal industry overall lower accident rates have been the increase in surface mining which is inherently safer. If the environmentalists get their way these safer worker practices will be replaced by the inherently more dangerous underground approaches where no new improvements in technology have been promoted; all this to support the safety of mayflies and fish.
And who will suffer; the people of Central Appalachia who have unselfishly put themselves at risk for over century to supply the nation’s needs. The chronic poverty imposed by the beautiful terrain isolates these people from the nation’s economy. They survive only because they harvest their natural resources to support the addiction of the rest of the nation. The relationship between the amount of land that is flat enough to develop and the rates of poverty and its inherent health issues is TWICE as strong as the popular media reports on the relationship between coal mining and poverty/health.
The attacks on surface mining and coal in general are relegating this population to perpetual poverty. They same Obama/Biden Administration that has lead the charge to protect the mayflies and fish from evil mining practices that are providing the only hope to overcome the tyranny of terrain by creating places to build a sustainable economy, is now going to turn its attention to the safety of mining as well. We can not wait for the results! Their approach seems to be the safest mines are the closed ones.
We need to reestablish programs like DOE’s “Small Business Innovative Research” programs for coal mining to encourage innovations that are safer and improve environmental performance and create small businesses among those that know the industry best…the mining families. Either that or do as many in congress seen to prefer and simply ban all coal mining and take the hit to our economy that would entail. I’m sure the nation will enjoy that!

Plus, who knows? Maybe this tragedy happened so that things with the coal mining industry will be fixed? Maybe FINALLY people will realize, and the president will do something. Everything happens for a reason. And I’m not trying to fight with anyone, but it doesn’t seem like any of you have really mentioned the miners or their families…and that’s the TRUE point of the story.