Echoes of Germinal, How Green Was My Valley

I cannot read stories about trapped miners without thinking of Emile Zola's Germinal and the movie How Green Was My Valley. It always shocks me that miners and mining accidents of this magnitude continue to exist in the Western world, since in my mind such deaths are indelibly associated with the Industrial Revolution and primitive technologies. I understand that the pay is good, and that the number of such accidents is small - I assume it is much safer to be a miner in the United States than to be a soldier these days. Still, shouldn't we be using robot technology at this point?

I can only imagine the anguish that the families went through as they waited, knowing that carbon monoxide was taking up what little oxygen was in the shafts, hoping against all hope that their loved ones were still alive - getting that hope handed to them and then suddenly yanked away leading to an outburst of raw anger. I also find myself trying to imagine what it was like for those miners - and the thought of the Kursk disaster comes to mind. The feeling of being trapped. Light running out. Air running out.

These stories profoundly bother me. They belong to a bygone era. And if faced with the choice of being a miner or a soldier in Iraq, I'd rather take my chances and die in the open.