Vol.64/No.6 February 14, 2000
Death toll grows from coal bosses' greed
BY JEREMY ROSE
EQUALITY, Illinois—With dozens of people standing in the aisles, about 300 people packed the St. Joseph Catholic Church here on January 29 for the funeral of Mark E. Wargel, 38, an underground coal miner. Wargel was killed three days earlier at the Pattiki Mine, just east of this Southern Illinois mining and farming town. Workers at the Pattiki Mine—operated by White County Coal Co., a subsidiary of Alliance Coal—are not organized.
In addition to family and friends, many of those attending the funeral were fellow coal miners. Wargel was married and the father of two children.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources are investigating the exact cause of the accident. What is known so far is that Wargel was killed by a rock fall when portions of the rib and roof collapsed, dropping a huge boulder on him. Wargel, who was a roof bolter, operated a machine that drills holes in the roof of the mine and inserts steel rods and glue to laminate several strata of rock to support the top. The rib of a mine is the side of a coal pillar left untouched to support the mine.
Federal mining regulations forbid anyone from entering an area where the roof has not been bolted or secured. Bolter operators work under a small canopy that protects them from small rock falls, but affords minimal protection from major rock falls or from roof or rib collapse.
Frequently, continuous-miner operators, who run the machine by remote control, will remove clearly unstable roof with the machine. But production demands by the bosses mean this usually only happens when a portion of the roof collapses on the mining machine itself.
Wargel is the first Illinois coal miner to die on the job in 2000. In 1998 no miners died in Illinois mines. Another miner, Earl Yates, was killed at the Pattiki mine in 1990. Last year one miner died at the Eagle Valley Mine near Equality when a rock fell on him while he was traveling out of the mine. Wargel was the second miner to die within a week's time as a result of the coal bosses' intensifying profit drive.
On January 21 Eddie Harris, 44, died in the No. 74 Leeco, Inc. mine near Hazard in eastern Kentucky. John Franklin of the Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals told the Louisville Courier Journal that Harris apparently came into contact with the cutter head of the continuous-mining machine. Harris left a wife and one child. Nine coal miners were killed on the job in Kentucky in 1999.
In 1999 34 deaths were recorded in the coal mining industry in the United States. According to MSHA, 11 miners were killed during September and October. The federal agency called it a "dramatic increase in mining fatalities." Twenty-nine coal miners were killed in mine accidents in 1998.
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