Wallace Street Journal
Another miner dies
David Bond
Editor, Silver Valley
Mining Journal
April 29, 2005
Wallace, Idaho -Another miner
died in another mining accident in another mine yesterday. Another
friend. Got tangled up in the air doors or something, according
to another mining company's press release. Another widow notified.
Another former wife just called. Another drinking buddy, and
a damned friendly one, gone.
Mining is not a particularly dangerous business. If you check
the workers compensation rates for mining companies you'll find
they are lower than the rates charged long-haul truckers, telephone
linemen and loggers. But mining kills with a certain strangeness,
suddenness and ugliness. Cody was 52, which at this end of the
perch seems too young. Why is it that the best stories about
Western hard-rock mining tend to be ghoulish? Steve Voynick's
"The
Making of a Hard-Rock Miner" two decades ago; this year
Gregg Olsen's "The
Deep Dark" and Fritz Wolff's "A
Room for the Summer" haunt you with tragedy even as
they try to tease the nobility out of the taciturn spirit of
the hard-rock miner. It's not that miners are a taciturn lot.
But the stories they have to tell are esoteric, nonsensical to
the uninitiated, and they require patience to be heard. They
require great hand gestures, copious drawings on cocktail napkins.
See, most of us live in one-dimensional worlds. A miner works
in 3-D, every day, and every moment one of those three dimensions
can punch itself out and kill you. The floor, the ceiling, the
walls, are all out to get you, and don't be too sure of the air
and water, either. Oh, and don't touch those 440-volt power lines.
Running your hand through a paper shredder would be a minor annoyance
to a miner.
Mining is an art, a creation of new universe. When a miner and
his partner blast a round out in a stope, they find themselves,
on the next shift and while the dust is still settling, standing
where no human being has ever stood before. The place they just
made didn't exist before. I have tried to describe being in a
silver mine to my non-mining friends in Starbucks/Seattle thusly:
It must be like standing on the moon. It is some of the most
creative and courageous labor conducted by mankind. And without
trying to sound like a suck-ass for the bosses, some of the guys
and gals who own silver mines are every bit as tough as the people
who go underground every day to work for them. They may not face
the daily visceral peril of rock-bursts, but they fight the savagery
of human nature, which is every bit as dangerous. If you own
or control a good silver or gold mine, not a day goes by that
somebody doesn't want a piece of you, doesn't want to take it
away from you. Because as the late Phil M. Lindstrom of Hecla
Mining Co. said to me in 1978: We're not mining rocks. We mine
money.
And that gets some attention.
What is frightening, in what I have seen in 3 decades of watching
this silver mining business, is how greedy the federal government
has become. The owner of a silver mine can't cross the street
in mid-day without filling out some paperwork and writing a check.
There is a thing called a Unilateral Administrative Order whereby
the EPA tells you what sort of toilet paper you will buy, or
to spend $7 million building an unnecessary ditch, or to spend
$14 million tearing up an unnecessary thing you were ordered
to build at your own expense in the first place. There is another
EPA weapon, called a "Request" For Information. It
is hardly a request. It gives you 30 days to provide every fact
you can about your personal and business finances. If you can't,
or your information isn't complete, you are staring at a $27,500
per day fine. They don't give time off (or monetary slack) to
hire lawyers.
People need silver, zinc and lead - if they want to continue
to use cell phones, televisions or computers or Fords. As the
population ages it will turn to silver for medicinal purposes,
for silver's non-pareil use as a biocide, and to silver as the
only cheap metal catalyst and the only cheap route to electrical
super-conductivity. The replacement of silver with digital imagery
in photography is hugely a myth. In other words, we need the
stuff if we're going to survive, and it has no economic replacement.
And if we admit that we need these metals, then why as a matter
of public policy are we imperiling the people who produce it?
What part of a UAO or an RFI secures the health and life of a
miner, or for that matter, a mine? Or have we, for reasons I
cannot calculate, just spawned a federal policy of viciousness,
to take over the mines from the private people who own and work
in them? Who will benefit from this?
David Bond
email:deepee@usamedia.tv
Archives
Editor: Silver Valley
Mining Journal
David Bond covers
gold and silver mining equities for a number of national and international
publishers, including Platts Metals Week, a division of McGraw-Hill.
He lives in Wallace, Idaho, heart of the planet's richest silver
fields, the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. He is former editor
of the Wallace Miner, and holds regional and national firsts in
investigative journalism from the Atlantic City Press Club (National
Headliner) and from the Society of Professional Journalists (SDX/SPJ)
and has edited or written for newspapers on both coasts, Canada
and Alaska.
321gold Inc
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