This is the news page for Department 200 - Mining and Minerals. This page displays *all* news items from this Department and its Unions. To see news only from a particular Union, click on the Union title below.
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Posted Pá, 11/19/2010 - 3:58am by x361943
27 miners missing after New Zealand explosion
By the CNN Wire Staff
November 19, 2010 -- Updated 0829 GMT (1629 HKT)
(CNN) -- Twenty-seven miners were missing hours after an underground explosion on New Zealand's west coast, company officials said Friday.
Two other miners had emerged from the the Pike River coal mine in Atarau, authorities said.
About three hours after the blast, police said no fatalities had been reported. Emergency workers were going into the mine, TV New Zealand said.
The two miners who had surfaced arrived at the Grey Base Hospital, an hour away, with non-life-threatening injuries, TV New Zealand said. They had moderate blast injuries, with one being treated in the emergency room and the other in a ward.
Emergency crews had interviewed the two miners, trying to determine what happened. The cause of the explosion was not immediately known, police said.
According to early accounts, an electrician went into the mine to investigate a power outage and discovered a driver who had been blown off his loader about 1,500 meters [0.9 mile] into the mine shaft.
A special mine rescue team was among the many emergency workers on the scene.
Communications underground were "terminated" when the explosion happened, Pike River CEO Peter Whittall said.
The entrance to the mine is about 2.2 kilometers along and then branches out, police said. The power outage might have compromised ventilation inside the mine.
Smoke hung outside the mine, trees were charred and a hut had been blown off a hill, TV New Zealand said.
There are two routes out of the mine, Whittall said. Unlike the Chilean mine where 33 miners were rescued in mid-October, the Pike River mine has steep terrain, and the shafts run horizontally into the hill, not vertically into the ground, he told TV New Zealand.
The remote mine is about 50 kilometers [31 miles] northeast of Greymouth, police said.
Posted Út, 05/30/2006 - 10:10am by x356985
By Jeff Pilacinski, Twin Cities GMB
On Saturday, June 3 we remember the valiant struggle of over 15,000 fellow workers and through our continued agitating in 2006, carry their fighting spirit forward. This date marks the 90th anniversary of the great mine workers strike on Minnesota’s Mesabi, Cuyuna, and Vermillion Iron Ranges – a strike that threatened the economic grip of the U.S. Steel war profiteers and strained relations between several prominent Wobbly organizers and the union’s general headquarters.
After a large uprising was crushed with the help of immigrant strike breakers in 1907, Minnesota mine workers were poised to confront the steel trust once again. In a report to the Minneapolis headquarters of the IWW’s Agricultural Workers Organization dated May 2, 1916, one organizer had “never before found the time so ripe for organization and action as just now.” The appeal from one Minnesota miner in the May 13, 1916 issue of the Industrial Worker summarized the workers’ discontent best as “the spirit of revolt is growing among the workers on the Iron Range,” and that there was a need for “workers who have an understanding of the tactics and methods of the IWW and who would go on the job, and agitate and organize on the job.” Less than a month later, an Italian worker at the St. James underground mine in Aurora opened his pay envelope and raged over his meager earnings under the corrupt contract system, whereby wages were based upon the load of ore dug and supplies used, not hours worked. By the time other miners arrived at the St. James for the night shift, production at the mine was halted. All pits in Aurora were soon shut down as the strikers proclaimed, “We’ve been robbed long enough. It’s time to strike.”
Posted Pá, 02/03/2006 - 2:27am by x344543
By Richard Myers - Industrial Worker, February 2006
One miner is injured in an explosion and will soon die. Twelve miners walk through the mine without necessary information or direction, their lives also in mortal danger.
The communication system has failed and ventilation controls were damaged during an explosion, allowing the buildup of dangerous gases. The emergency response is deficient, it fails to protect and evacuate miners at risk.
But this was not the Sago Mine in West Virginia. This was Brookwood, in Alabama, September of 2001. There had been a methane explosion, injuring four miners. Three were carried to safety. A second, larger explosion took the lives of the miner immobilized in the first blast, and twelve would-be rescuers. It was one disaster in an endless thread of disasters, a continuing calamity across the ages.
Posted St, 06/29/2005 - 12:28am by x344543
By Geoffrey Frost - Industrial Worker, June 2005.
Several Wobblies in Pittsburgh and in Appalachia are working to support Mountain Justice Summer. Mountain Justice Summer is a campaign to stop Mountaintop Removal (MTR) mining, an environmentally devastating mining practice.
Mountaintop removal is what it sounds like: coal companies blast off the tops of mountains to get at thin seams of coal that are hauled off to fire the power plants. MTR is how the power companies provide "cheap" energy to the rest of the United States. Of course, it doesn't really come cheap. Mountaintop removal is the neoliberal vision fulfilled: a handful of poorly paid, non-union workers destroying one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth to fuel power plants that spew out yet more pollution upon the usually poor working-class communities around them, all the while stoking the furnace of global warming that causes the deaths of thousands upon thousands of working people each year and is only growing worse.
This is the cheap energy that dooms our children to asthma, mercury poisoning, and perhaps no future at all. This is the "cheap" energy demanded by our government.s financiers to fuel their uninhibited accumulation of wealth at the expense of all else.
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