
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 11, 1994                   TAG: 9402250021
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TRYING TO AVERT MINE DISASTERS

THE DEATHS of eight miners in a methane gas explosion at a Wise County mine in 1992 marked a breakdown in individual and corporate responsibility for safety. But it also was a terrible revelation of inadequacies in Virginia's mine safety law.

Just over a year after the accident at Southmountain Coal Co.'s No. 3 mine, a legislative subcommittee is finishing its work on proposed changes. This is good.

No amount of legislation is going to eliminate the dangers inherent in digging miles underground to extract minerals from the earth, destabilizing tons of rock and soil overhead and opening pockets of explosive gas in the process. Nor can any regulations offer a substitute for individual care and common sense in observing safe work practices (such as not smoking in a mine shaft).

But effective safety measures can reduce the danger.

Lawmakers are proposing changes that emphasize accident-prevention and safety at the mines, in addition to more frequent and more thorough state inspections. Inspectors cannot be at every mine every minute, so it is critically important that the people running and working the mines have both a sincere commitment to protecting lives and the expertise to do it right.

The expertise can be taught. Requiring updated certifications, certification for everyone at the face of a mine in using methane detectors, and demonstrated knowledge by the foreman of a mine's ventilation and roofing system would go a long way toward ensuring that risk factors are understood and warning signs recognized and heeded.

Commitment to safety can be neither taught nor legislated into existence. But changing the application process to help identify bad operators with poor safety records, and giving state enforcement agencies authority to revoke or deny mine licenses, would begin to weed out those with a demonstrated disregard for the lives of others.

And a provision for anonymously reporting violations is essential. Individual miners who face the dangers of going underground every day should be their own best safety inspectors. They must feel free to alert regulators to systematic violations of safety standards without fear of retribution.

Such changes in the law might prevent the conditions that helped create the disaster at Southmountain from developing again, elsewhere. But even if all of them are enacted, as they should be, there will remain a need that Del. Clarence Phillips of St. Paul points out: some provision for periodic review of the state's mine safety laws.

The current law has not been revised in the past 40 years, a period when mechanization has revolutionized mining. The pace of change continues unabated, and the law should be responsive. Lives should not have to be lost before measures are considered that might prevent loss of life.

Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994 FATALITY

by CNB