Coal mine safety

There’s been a flurry of newspaper articles and posts wondering whether more could have been done to increase the safety in coal mines in the aftermath of the death of twelve coal miners this week. Our heart go out to the friends and families of the miners. Every man’s death diminishes me, etc. And, of course, more could have been done.

But there’s precious little evidence that there was any causal link between the Sago Mine disaster and any special laxness of the Bush Administration. Courtesy of BizzyBlog there’s an interesting chart of coal mining deaths over the last ten years:

Here’s the raw data:

Year	Deaths
2005	22
2004	28
2003	29
2002	27
2001	42
2000	38
1999	34
1998	19
1997	30
1996	38
1995	47

Source: Mine Safety and Health Administration

Some of the deaths are due to falls; some are due to accidents like the ones that happened at Sago; some are due to other reasons.

James Joyner wonders if a drop-off in mining employment isn’t the reason for the reduction in fatalities in the industry. That’s a good guess. In 1996 there were 120,602 coal miners. By 2003, there were 71,023. That’s roughly a fatality rate of 3 per 10,000 miners and 4 per 10,000 miners respectively without much of a change in the amount of coal produced i.e. productivity increased substantially.

I suppose an alarmist would point to the change with concern but it looks to me like the reality is the numbers are pretty small in what is, admittedly, a hazardous industry. I think some perspective is called for.

Coal mining in China accounts for 30% of the world’s production (U. S. production accounts for about 20%) and 80% of the world’s coal mining fatalities with more than 6,000 deaths per year. Those are the deaths to which the Chinese government admits. The actual number is thought to be much higher—possibly as many as 20,000 deaths per year.

BizzyBlog attributes the high fatality rate in China to corruption but I think that he fails to understand that in China corruption is not a perversion of the system—it is the system. Without corruption I wonder if their system would work at all. In offical-speak “corruption” pretty much means “non-performance” (although I’m aware that there’s plenty of real corruption, too).

Each Chinese miner—by my calculation over 5,000,000 of them—produces only 321 tons of coal per year, a tiny fraction of the whopping 16,000 tons produced by each American miner. Clearly, the Chinese are substituting labor for capital investment.

The tragedy of it is that China has significant ability to make capital investments but instead of doing it they’re letting their assets stack up in corrupt, inefficient Chinese banks in their cockamamie system of one-way trade.

So, if our motivation is compassion for the friends and families of miners killed in coal mining accidents, we should be turning our eyes to China and insisting that the Chinese start investing in their own mines.

UPDATE: On re-reading this post I recognized that I hadn’t made the point I wanted to make: the call for higher penalties and heightened inspection of mines is well-intentioned but mistaken. The obvious reason for the very low fatality rate among coal miners in the United States is that operators recognize that miners are vital productive assets and hard to replace. In today’s United States the average coal miner makes $40,000 to $60,000 and may make as much as $100,000 (with overtime). And positions are going unfilled. You don’t take unnecessary risks with vital employees.

IMO this is the right course for the United States. Rather than an ever-growing number of unskilled, poorly compensated, and easily replaced employees, I think a smaller number of more highly skilled, more highly compensated, and hard to replace workers whose employers are concerned about their safety will make for a better America.

Higher fines and increased inspection will just increase costs leading to the closing of marginally producing mines and the loss of good jobs and higher taxes (or more government borrowing).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Locus Media says my numbers are incorrect. I plead “Not Guilty”: the EIA Annual Coal Report (cited above) numbers differ from the MHSA numbers. Go figure. Perhaps some smart person can explain why this is. It makes little difference to my tentative conclusions. Take a look at the following chart (using MSHA figures).

I don’t see a clear trend here. And, I repeat, the numbers are quite small.