“He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.”

Written in the 1930s, when coal was absolutely dominant in energy production…but even now, coal supports an awfully big part of our civilization.

I heard Hatfield talk about this and he said that they knew within the first hour that they would have to clarify, but he did not want to do it more than once. In other words he did not want to come out with statement after statement.

Someone just jumped the gun and the media ran with it. And you know, maybe they hoped it was true, and people were alive.

Very sad.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/04/D8EU32887.html

The head of the company that owns a West Virginia coal mine where 12 miners died says the owners “sincerely regret” that families erroneously believed for three hours that their loved ones were alive.

Ben Hatfield says about 45 minutes after an initial erroneous report that 12 miners had survived, word came that all but one of the miners were dead. He says the immediate reaction was that the report could be wrong. And he says company officials didn’t feel it was prudent to pass that along to families, without being sure.

He says, “In the process of being cautious, we allowed the jubilation to go on longer than it should have.”

Imagine that, waiting for confirmation..how quaint.

************

Unfortunetly there isn’t a shread of evidence that I’ve seen as to who actually told the families the initial “good news”

A couple of rumors, but nothing concrete.

And it WAS the media that compounded any initial error.

And the Company was correct in wanting to get the facts straight before telling the family.

That they didn’t come out and say, wait that rumor you heard was wrong, and NOT have the truth, wouldn’t have been a decision I would want to make.

Performing CPR wearing full-face masks and carrying oxygen on 13 people.

I can understand garbled.

Once upon a time Journalism was a craft practiced by adults with real-life experience in the military, in small business, on the farm, or public service where the wisdom gained by actual knowledge informed the best coverage of complex issues. Now we have method acting meat-puppets with good hair and soft academic degrees.

You do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about.

The media did the same thing here that they did with Katrina… they decided they would get the maximum mileage out of someone else’s pain and suffering.

I live in Indiana. I know coal miners. I know how these kinds of thing works. I know of people who have actually lost people in these kinds of accidents and the truth is nobody knew anything for sure within twenty minutes. That is the whole damn point.

People don’t know anything about the business, they do not know if the management was negligent or not, they do not understand the citations or what they mean, they don’t even know what it entailed in a rescue like this.

I got up last night and turned on the TV and I smelled a rat immediately. I knew there had been no confirmation from the mining people of what had happened. There had been no press conference called.

There was just a lot of idiot reporters making a bad situation worse than it had to be for the sheer nasty fun of it and now before the first miner has even been buried the media and their loyal fan club are all ready trying to find someone to blame.

Mining is a dangerous business. My father was a roughneck on the oil rigs and damn near died in a terrible accident many years ago. There are certain kinds of jobs that carry inherent risks. So before we turn that manager Hatfield into Micheal Brown maybe we should wait and see what is going on.

BTW, if anything comes of this it will be more paperwork, more regulations, and in the end people will still die in terrible accidents like this.