"blacklung" (if the explosions don't get you)

Women would never do it, but still demand they get paid as much as you to do their much safer job.

⁠@@iamcondescendingwhat are you on about? Women want to be paid equally for the same jobs (like a male and female shop manager or teacher should be paid the same), not randomly for jobs they are not doing…

And you are NOT on a battlefield.

@@charliekezza What does this have to do with Red Dead Redemption 2?

It's terribly frustrating

Especially in America

Incorrect. In this case it wasnt. Because they fullfilled all safety standarts of the time. As far as we know of course. But still.

A lot of the time they don't want to pay reparations, for whatever reason 🥴

The clout of mining companies in West Virginia cannot be overstated. Responsibility is rarely assigned to entities with this much power and influence.

WV has historically been the coal mining center of the Eastern US. Much of the rural economy today is still shaped by mines, whether they’re open or not.

119 documented from what I've read. Jesus Christ.

Yup. Over 500 lives were lost in the Monongah and Eccles mine disasters. Not to mention Buffalo Creek, where three coal slurry dams burst, killing 125 people and destroying 550 homes. My teacher in high school lived at Buffalo Creek and survived the flood, and he was always haunted by it.

@@hannahferrell7534 Buffalo Creek was terrible, avoidable and totally caused by neglect and disregard for safety.

“WV is rich with coal” says the video. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to do much for the average WV citizen. It’s one of the poorest (and least educated states). Coal is not clean or safe but watch WV fight any effort to limit it or restrict it. And Kentucky.

Interesting post.

Much respect for WV miners. It’s a dirty dangerous job and they need recognition and respect

Past time to end our dependence on fossil fuels!

⁠@@susangreene9662….🙄 Really? End use of fossil fuels? Never gonna happen. At least not in this lifetime.

My Grandma remembered shopping at the company store.

in a couple of years time, he could probably go over a lot of our more modern stuff from this year. because 2023 needs to chill the fuck out

It’s grim, but important to make sure nobody forgets about events like these.

I can imagine him in a few years covering the Oceangate incident.

I remember borrowing "The greatest disasters of the 20th century" as an 8 year old from my school library. It's stuck with me ever since. Some horrid disasters there

Neither...you should be horribly fascinated

Multiple exits and barrier doors would help keep workers in that situation safe.

​@@jamesfowley4114, barrier doors could trap people in. I call for more exhaust fans, to kick in should others fail, and keep the air clean and breathable.

The poor had to work, a lot knew it would kill them young. Black lung killed a lot of people

The first explosion was approximately 5 - 6 miles away from those workers on the east side of the mine. Some said they thought they had heard a jet breaking the sound barrier, but continued working until they were told to come to the surface.

​@@patriciamariemitchelin a mine explosion a lot of times restarting the fans make it worse. In the initial explosion dust is kicked up leading to possible secondary ignitions

It's always the rookies and/or the old timers that have been there so long that they shouldn't even be working in the first place

@@generaleerelativity9524 You sound like a manager blaming the workers.

"Accidents" are always caused by something. Very seldom is it caused by something like a ...Rhinoceros wandering into the lobby of a Miami hotel. But if it happens, you can bet they'll make another rule...

profits > lives is all you need to know

Even the Aberfan Disaster (Fascinating Horror - amongst others - has a video on it) was caused by human error: the humans that decided it was safe to tip mine waste on top of a mountain stream.

Coal Miners provided and continue to provide power and warmth to their community. It's something to be proud of.

they also help contribute to human causes global warming with the product they provide

My dad was a coal miner in South Wales, UK for all his working life. It was expected that working-class boys born in the mining communities would become coal miners. A few were lucky, got themselves an education and became teachers or solicitors. Some were shopkeepers or policemen. But the vast majority became miners, as that was all there was available to make a living.

​@@peterf.229 that's true for most jobs though, with many having much more influence on it than a single miner.

Couldn’t happen to a better person

Look into the Aberfan, Wales slag disaster. True heroism there.

Ok

@@itsjohndell I feel like I saw this on The Crown. That Queen Elizabeth was a real hero.

Rich corporations are the worst of humanity, while the locals suffering from corporate shortcomings are the best of it lol

​@@GlennDaveywas she really, though?

Strip mining is an abomination. Yes, West Virginia and East Kentucky are beautiful but have been horribly exploited

I got chills now

Having songs that express what miners went through help provide a voice for a people that rarely had one. I also love these lines from a Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band song "The Mountain": There's a hole in this mountain It's dark and it's deep And God only knows all the secrets it keeps There's a chill in the air only miners can't feel And there's ghosts in the tunnels that the company sealed.

Both of the songs quoted literally gave me chills.

There's also Jeanne Ritchie's "West Virginia Mine Disaster".

Exactly

I am assuming it was a West Virginia judge. A friend of mine from there once told me West Virginia is not a state, it's a colony, owned by rich people and corporations that live far away and just exploit it. There is no statute of limitations on murder, except for corporations.

The "judge" told me that, he'd be hangin' from the nearest telephone pole within the hour as rumors that someone paid him off quickly spread.

Interesting that everybody's mad at the judge for dismissing the case for arguably good reason. But nobody seems at all angry about the lowlife who had that information and sat on it for 46 years... To my mind, that's the real villain in this scenario.

@@Lucinda_JacksonMakes you wonder if it was him who was responsible for shutting off the alarm system and he waited until the incident faded from most peoples memory before blaming it on a now dead workmate to ease his conscience a bit and give survivors and their families a bit of closure.

Did he work during the Great Depression? My grandparents had trouble finding work too. I think they had a small farm and sold chickens and eggs to the neighborhood. They lived in Nebraska back then. After the economy bounced back, they became school teachers. They drilled into all of their kids and grandkids that the best way to survive is to get a college education. Sadly, my grandpa died before the Great Recession in the mid-2000s, but my grandma lived long enough to see how it didn't work out that way for her grandkids. Even those of us with college educations can't afford our own houses.

PA mines were (and are) dangerous too. My grandmother's uncle was a mine electrician before the days of lockout/tagout. He was working on the wires one day and told the guys not to turn on the lights ... someone either didn't know or forgot. I can't imagine being the worker that flipped the switch for the lights and had to live with that for the rest of his life.

To be fair... if safety standarts of back then were fullfilled, the company effectivly did do all it couldbased on what was thought/known/considered to be safe. As much as I agree companies need to be punished for cutting corners, if they do fullfill safety standarts, its not fully their fault if something goes wrong. Thats why safety standarts need constant updating and enforcement.

They weren't even following the standards pre-disaster though. NPR did an investigation on it that showed a mechanic showed up at 3am, and didn't check the fan in question wich was broken. Post disaster, the alarm was found to be deliberately bypassed, and this was put in a memo to the Bureau of Mines, but the memo was ordered to be filed away though@@ethribin4188

@@ethribin4188did you watch the video? The company may have circumvented existing safety regulations presumably for greater profits.

​@@ethribin4188In a perfect world, that might be the case. But unfortunately we live in a world where massively profitable companies are allowed to lobby the politicians and, in turn, influence the regulations that they have to adhere to. There's a reason why cigarette companies were so insistent that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer and why the 0.1% of studies that reach an "inconclusive" conclusion about Climate Change are funded by Exxon Mobil, BP, and other fossil fuel companies.

And that's cold comfort to the families who lost loved ones. Piling on to victims.

Except his conversion on square km to square mi is incorrect. Oops.

It's a pretty important thing! I stop watching channels that's don't provide metric and other SI units.

My husband was from Harlan county. You can drive around the communities in E. Kentucky and still see the company houses and the company stores. They are not company towns anymore, but poor people still live in the houses. Remember the Patty Lovelace song: "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." It's also called Bloody Harlan because of the strikes.

When I moved out west and found people had no idea about WV and the coal industry. I always recommend they watch Harlan County USA and Matewan.

That's the issue with the law, it's only really a law if it's enforced fairly and equally. I am unfamiliar with the story but I suspect that the law was implemented to pacify public opinion rather than to enact change

@@Kanbei11 It appears that way. It targets the executives and management of corporations, the same people they cozy up to in backdoor meetings and coddle because of the taxes generated by the business. So it seems to just be a token gesture if it was never implemented. There was an incident locally, where there was impounded water on one level and it was encroaching onto an active ore pass. It is an incredibly dangerous occurrance to have muck (broken ore trammed by scoops) mixed with water in a pass (a chute between two levels). Dry muck is controlable at the bottom, where wet and worse, soaked muck can possibly cause a run. One of the people involved, a shift boss that I had worked with, had sent multiple internal emails to his bosses with concerns about that ore pass and possible water entering into it. Those went ignored, or at least, never dealt with. Around three weeks after the water issue started, that ore pass hung up at the bottom on the lower level. That shiftboss and the scoop operator were in the area, rigging an exposive shot to loosen the much and get the pass down when it let go and rushed out, burying them both. The company ended up with some nominal fine, a couple of hundred thousand and nobody on management was ever charged with anything. This is a multi-billion dollar corporation, that fine was loose change and didn't even go to the families.

There are quite a few mining disasters on this channel, in different countries. Note to self: do not going into a mine.

Yes this is why safety regulations are important. Companies are designed by nature to place priority on making more money to please shareholders. The free market is great but it doesn't magically solve all issues so a regulating body is needed or companies will cut corners. Imagine living in your house if it didn't have any electrical, fire, or safety regulations. Also after these incidents happen new regulations are always added which is us learning from our mistakes. Every company owner can't be expected to know the history of every single incident after all. Regulatory bodies make far more sense

And the attitude of the mining company? Basically - 'shit happens'.

I have appreciated this approach since I found his channel. It's refreshing to have someone who is straightforward, not including sensationalism or opinion, and who doesn't beg for likes/subscribes! His matter-of-fact reporting makes these stories worse than if they were "improved" with sensationalist stuff.

Good point highlighting just how entirely local communities were held over a financial barrel by the big mining conglomerates! 😢 Must have made it really difficult for them to feel they could effectively demand safer conditions, even via unionization or by voting to elect safety-minded public officials who might change industry regulations? The extremity of their circumstances seems to have actually fostered a kind of perverse pride for many coalminers too - not just in their skill, but in how dangerous the work was & thus how "hard" they were? Which also contributed to later problems with improving safety practice. We still see some echoes of that attitude to safety today. It's hard to get one's head around just how unpleasant their working conditions must have been...? Spending their days deep underground, in cramped & odiferous quarters, constantly filthy, working to exhaustion, risking black lung & explosions & collapses & shaft floods. Yikes.

@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 Difficult is an understatement. What the mining companies did was essentially legal slavery. They owned the town, the store, the local utilities, and they essentially were the government. If a miner got fired, then he was suddenly thrust into a situation where the only money he had was worthless outside of the company store, and now he and his family were being kicked out of their homes because the company owned them. The conditions that pushed miners to strike were beyond abysmal. The companies saw them as fully expendable, and did everything they could to control their lives. And when the miners did strike, the companies called in the government to deal with the situation rather then give up a single speck of their power. Never forget that the history of safety regulation is written in blood. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Where do you mine?

I’m a 5th generation WV miner… started in low coal, have 12 years and counting so far on the longwall.

I think that's a problem with our culture, it is "profit at any cost" driven.

Wage Slaves blood.

Chewsday 😂

Such a shame.

The same was done with the Wellington Pit Disaster in 1910. Sadly once any significant fire takes hold there is nothing that can be done to stop it other than seal the mine. You give time for anyone alive to get out from other routes then you have to deal it. No-one is going to be alive because of the build-up of CO and CO2.

Only 10 Years ago isn't long. Sadly it's only a matter of time before another tragedy.

@@griffith5704you have a point, but as someone who’s worked in a coal mine I don’t see such a large scale disaster happening again in the United States unless lots of things go terribly wrong. Miners aren’t inbred hillbillies, they take gas detection and stuff extremely seriously. After the huge fallout with Don Blankenship most miners refuse to let that sort of thing happen again.

Is that a real song? I'm gonna google it... 👍 Edit- thank you, I found it- I remember this song from many years ago... Very moving tbh..

Crazy how they couldn't find alot of bodies.

​@@kevlarkid928seriously creepy!

I saw the film version. I'll just point out the huge house it showed them living in was very much not real. Typically you'd be looking at a terraced house about 4 metres wide, 2 rooms upstairs and 2 downstairs. If you were really lucky you'd have a privy in the yard, if not you'd be sharing a few households to one.

I live a few miles away from the old ironworkers cottages at Blaenavon (South Wales, UK). A visit to those tiny basic houses really makes me appreciate my modern comforts, my house being a spacious railway worker's terrace cottage from the 1880s for comparison.

Yes! Please do the DeBruce Grain Elevator!

I was just going to comment this.

I’ve never heard anyone talk of that kind of coal mining at that time with a deep affection. Cameraderie among miners, yes. The job? No.

It's a historical picture probably from the mid 1800's, not a representation of miners in 1968.

I don’t think anyone WANTS such disasters, but I know what you mean :)

Clearly they were Republicans.

@@johnarmenta2199 Don't bring politics into this.

@@Die-Angst So sad but also so true... 😔

There is an Email address for suggestions in the video description

😢😢