The Dangers Involved in Mining Work
Despite only accounting for 0.1% of the workforce around the world, mining is responsible for 0.3% of work-related deaths. This shows that even with all our advances in technology, this age-old profession is still a seriously hazardous undertaking. Added to this is the fact that the key mining nations, such as China and Russia, don’t follow safety practices as stringently, treating life as cheap, and precautions as a form of luxury. The result is around twelve thousand deaths a year.
Wall failures and roof collapse are one of the key dangers. In a roof collapse incident in China in 2005 two hundred and ten people were killed in one day. Advances in technology should help prevent this. New braces, which hold up the roof of the mine, are essential to cut down these types of accident, but they’re only in place in mines around the developed world, and as such the majority of miners work without them.
Around the upper levels of the mine it is wall collapse and vehicle collisions that create the most hazards, but further down there are other potential catastrophes. A range of gases that build up in the earth and are released by mining activity can create a spectrum of problems, from suffocation to massive explosions. These gases are known as ‘damps.’ Black damp is a mixture of CO2 and nitrogen that kills by suffocation, fire damp is a large release of methane gas, which can lead to fireballs engulfing mine shafts once it finds an ignition source, and white damp is carbon monoxide, which is a toxic gas, and kills by poisoning the blood.
Even once outside of the mines the dangers continue. Many workers find that long exposure to soot-filled air leads to chronic lung diseases. There are various types, but black lung is the most common. Health and safety measures should protect workers from this kind of illness, but in nations such as China this is not considered important, the aim being instead to profit as much as possible regardless of human cost.
The developed world has done a lot to protect its own workers, but the fact remains that much of our coal comes from places where people work at a level of terrifying risk.
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