Do You Have A “Self Contained Self Rescuer?”

Oh Boy…A Coal Mining Accident


This is almost as good as an Airliner Crash (for the media)

I’m sitting around this evening watching FOX News with one eye and reading and writing on the computer with my fingers and toes, and I guess that by now that everyone has heard about the thirteen men trapped in the coal mine up in West Virginia.

This situation strikes particularly close to home for me because my Grandfather didn’t want me to be a coal miner.

You see, my Father’s Father was a coal miner—he spent nearly fifty years working in the coal mines of Southern Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, and the "coal belt" of West Virginia. He actually worked his way up, without much of a formal education, to being one of the mine’s Superintendents when he finally retired in the 1970’s

He spent almost half of his life under ground…and the man couldn’t eat Christmas dinner or travel to Alabama or Florida on vacation without worrying about his equipment and personnel that performed, like our military, a necessary service to our country.

Papa Rogers was born in 1912 and was too young to serve in WWI, but he honorably received a deferment from military service in WWII because coal mining was considered a national priority just like tail gunning in a B-25 Bomber (my Uncle John did that) was in 1942.

He also made sure that my Father and his two brothers went to college, and that they had employment options outside of wearing a metal hardhat with a light on top. As a result, my sister and I have pursued careers occupying desks above ground rather than riding an electric cart under ground every day to work.

Mining is horrible, but dangerously necessary work. The technology employed over the last 100 years has greatly reduced the level of personal risk, but unlike workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11 or your co-workers in Boston or St. Simons or wherever else in the USA—if you work in an underground mine you go to work EVERY SINGLE DAY realizing that you might not come back home alive.

I can’t imagine facing that reality. I can’t imagine putting a mother and wife and children through that process every day.

But…the level of ineptitude of the reporters amazes me as I watch the live news conferences.

The media seems to be obsessing over whether or not the miners had a Self Contained Self Rescuer (click here) -- Also known as a "60 Minute Breathing Apparatus (click here)."

I found the above info on the internet in about two minutes of "research." The people at the news conference apparently have no internet skills and no staff support when it comes to doing background research.

Most of these people actually graduated from college?

After FOUR years of college, or did they get the "accelerated" degree from the University of Phoenix Online? Or maybe they went to Troy (State) University where most of the liberal scholars that were responsible for my primary and secondary school education got their Masters Degrees?

I say that we let the coal miners start doing news reporting and we put most of the professional “news reporters” on an electric cart, hand them a pick and shovel, and push them into the bowels of the earth so that they can actually serve some useful purpose.

Maybe a reporter could replace a little yellow Canary in the mine, "sniffing" for CO2 and Methane…