Asunto: | [LEA-Venezuela] MINERIA SUBTERRANEA¿Cuantos muertos está bien? | Fecha: | Martes, 10 de Enero, 2006 14:11:02 (-0400) | Autor: | Jorge Hinestroza M. <vitae @......com>
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[USMRA] For a Safer Mine, Try More Training Bandeja de entrada
Rob McGee <usmra@...> a minerescue
Más opciones 8 ene (2 días antes)
For a Safer Mine, Try More Training
New York Times
January 8, 2006
THE explosion that killed 12 miners in West Virginia last week was the worst
coal mining disaster in the United States in four years. But smaller
accidents happen all the time. In 2005, 22 workers died at coal mines across
the country, most of them one at a time.
That total is one of the lowest on record, and a far cry from the case 40
years ago, when 250 or more coal workers died each year. But is a score of
deaths the best the industry can do? Is it possible to make a completely
safe coal mine?
"The answer to your question is yes," said J. Davitt McAteer, a vice
president of Wheeling Jesuit University and an expert on mine safety. "There
are mines that have been in operation for 20 or 30 years and have not had
explosions."
The critical factors in preventing injuries and deaths, said Mr. McAteer,
who was a mine safety official in the Clinton administration, are training
and follow-through. "Mines are like everything else," he said. "You and I
get lackadaisical about safety conditions in our garage. But we're not going
to blow ourselves up. In mines it's a big deal."
The safest mines, Mr. McAteer said, are those where management takes
training seriously and where rules are followed rigorously, to the point
where workers are threatened with dismissal for ignoring them. "It took
years to get companies to do this," he said. Some of the better companies
today were the worst offenders in the past, he said.
But it's not all training, said R. Larry Grayson, chairman of the department
of mining and nuclear engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla.
Technology is available to help monitor conditions that could lead to
accidents.
For example, Mr. Grayson said, the last major disaster, explosions at an
Alabama mine that killed 13 workers in 2001, might have been prevented had
there been pressure sensors on the ventilation system. Other sensors can
detect slight ground movements that can precede a roof collapse in a mining
area. Roof collapses were the cause of nine deaths last year.
Some practices are more dangerous than others. "Room and pillar" mining, in
which blocks of unmined coal are left to support the rock overhead, can be
hazardous, particularly when the blocks are removed at the end of the
process. (Miners refer to the last one as the "suicide pillar.")
Safer is longwall mining, in which operators are protected by roof supports
that are part of the machine. But safer still would be robotic equipment
that can be operated remotely. "But automation is decades away," Mr. Grayson
said.
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