The rescue: the week after

A rescuer in the mine in Yuzhou, China, where -- with 30 miners already known dead -- hope was all but abandoned for the still-missing seven.

by Ken

When I wrote last week, bleary-eyed from my overnight glued-to-the-tube vigil, about the still-ongoing Chilean mine rescue, I noted in closing:

There will be plenty of time to talk about the cost of this whole operation, and where it fits into the grand scheme of the socioeconomic order. For now, I'm as dumbfounded as anybody.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik has covered a good deal of that still-to-be-covered territory in a "Talk of the Town Piece, "A Way Out" (under the heading "Story of the Week"), in the new issue (Oct. 25).

I'm pleased to see that Gopnik's basic take isn't much different from mine.

Chilean miner madness: it has been the condition of the past week in New York City, despite the fact that it is, in essence, a small story involving a country that no one has paid much attention to, and with no obvious ripples affecting us here in the United States. . . . [W]ho wouldn't be moved by hearing the Chilean national anthem, sung by proud Chileans as the miners rose to the surface. Chilean exceptionalism! it's a beautiful thing.

The truth is that this was an honest-to-God human-interest story, whose appeal is the eternal appeal of all child-down-a-well sstories; it is a story of something bad that turned out fine in the end. In the repetitive ribbon of stories that enwrap our existence, there are too few tales of this kind. . . . Only in a handful of stories, curiously set in places very high or very low -- astronauts lost in space, mountaineers marooned on summits, and these trapped miners -- is there hope of a true happy ending, in which losses are restored and sorrows cease.

Gopnik suggests some of the ways in which the rescue might be Hollywoodified, including "relocat[ion] to West Virginia, where the men can be blonder and speak English." He notes, however:

The real heroes are hard to dramatize -- the rescue workers who went down into the mine to show the miners how the rescue would work, and then stayed there till the end. True courage is mostly choices, not gestures -- difficult to make dramatic.

And then he gets into some of that stuff I left for some later time.

In the midst of it all, three significant facts got lost: what was being mined (copper and gold); how much a Chilean miner typically earns (sixteen hundred dollars a month); and how many Chilean miners have died in accidents in the past decade (about three hundred and forty).

At the end of the week, after every miner was up,. safe and sound, it was odd to see how eager the TV anchors were to insist that the worst lay ahead for them -- and not just for the miner whose mistress showed up in place of his wife. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, but let's not underestimate the power of post-traumatic stress delight: thierty-three men can now say, for the rest of their lives, "At least I'm not trapped down at the bottom of a mine." Certainly, veterans of war suffer, but how many also shine with the quiet feeling that, from now on, life can never get quiet enough. People are trapped by circumstances; other people help them. There is a way out. Since this is the fable that every life hopes to trace, maybe the madness isn't so mad at all.

In addition to the endless coverage, as Gopnik notes, of the prophesied gloom and doom for the rescued 33, already we're seeing stories about splits among them (cf. "Rescued Miners' Secrecy Pact Erodes in Spotlight"), including breeches of supposed "unity" pacts on post-rescue activities and cooperative profiteering. I don't care. I don't propose to pay any attention.

If there are guys who think they can make a killing on what they've been through, I don't begrudge them. If there are guys willing to sell themselves for a pittance, I feel bad for them. I will just note that nobody's going to make as much as a nickel off my interest.

I'm saddened to see reports that the death toll has reached 30 and hope was fading for the still-missing seven miners in Henan province, China ("Hopes Fade for China Miners After Deadly Leak"). Of course hopes for the 33 Chilean miners had also been all but written off. The Chinese outcome, however, is overwhelmingly the more usual one.

The CNN correspondent in Hong Kong who was monitoring online response to the rescue doings overnight noted a wave of bitterness from Chinese commenters who paid tribute to the Chilean government's resolve to rescue its miners, in contrast to their own government's record of relative insouciance. As Gopnik notes, one of the factors in the Chilean government's determination was its own poor record with the mine disasters that are apparently a regular occurrence in mining the subterranean riches of Chile's desolate northern Atacama desert.

Certainly I'm hoping some attention will rub off onto the dreadful U.S. record of mine safety, and safety with respect to resource extraction generally, in the Glorious Era of Deregulation, in which finally we succeeded in getting that damned gummint off our backs. The Bush regime's unapologetic contempt for the very idea of enforcing even the laws and regulations on the books could only be read as acceptance that the human toll -- in deaths, incapacitations, and just plain physical deterioration, without even getting into the vast realm of environmental spoilage -- is "the price we pay" for obtaining those resources, an attitude that appeared to have been carried over intact into the Obama administration version of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, helping lay the groundwork for the Gulf oil-spill disaster.

Without in any way diminishing the uplift of the worldwide outpouring of interest and concern evidenced during the Chilean rescue, which understandably was the primary concern until the trapped miners were safely above ground, we can see, I think, that longer-term what should concern us is the exceptional nature of that outcome.

Yesterday the Scranton Times-Tribune published this editorial:

Make more happy endings

People around the world watched joyfully last week as, one by one, 33 Chilean miners who had been trapped a half mile underground for six weeks emerged into the arms of their loved ones.

The event had special resonance for Northeast Pennsylvania, where most older residents easily can recall the shock, tension and, most often, despair rather than joy resulting from deep-mine accidents.

It's worth noting that the successful rescue was at least partly due to American engineering expertise, from the involvement of NASA engineers who designed the rescue capsule, to American drilling experts who responded to the scene from as far away as Afghanistan.

And it's a reminder as well that mine safety in the United States itself remains a work in progress - the most recent evidence of which was the explosion in April that killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

The technology used to extricate the Chilean miners is marvelous. But the objective in the United States should be to ensure that safety regulation and enforcement preclude the need to use that technology.

"A work in progress" seems an awfully kindly characterization, especially with reference to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, which was presided over by Massey Energy's career-criminal CEO Don Blankenship, whose business is essentially built on spitting at mining laws and regulations, and who by now should surely be serving a host of concurrent life sentences for the murders of his miners (presuming he's tried by a judge he hasn't bought) rather than proclaiming government efforts to regulate mine safety "as silly as global warming."

Every day a thug like Blankenship goes unindicted is another day of mockery of any pretense to concern for either the people he employs or the land he befouls.

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