Collapse of Dignity (14 page)

Most of the things one imagines in hell are there in the coal mine—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.

—
GEORGE ORWELL

I was sixteen years old the first time I set foot in a mine. My father,
newly elected as leader of the Miners' Union, had asked me to come along on his visit to the Real del Monte y Pachuca silver and gold mine in the state of Hidalgo. It was one of the oldest mines in the country, and also one of the deepest and most massive, containing somewhere around three thousand miles of tunnels. When we arrived, my father chatted with the workers as I was equipped for our descent into the 3,000-foot-deep mine. It felt like a ritual, putting on the overalls and heavy, steel-toed boots; being fitted with a miner's helmet; strapping on the belt containing a first-aid kit and battery for the lamp; and putting on the harness and ropes that the workers relied on for survival.

As we went down into the mine in a very rudimentary elevator that was lowered by a winch, my father explained that in each mine there are levels, just like the floors of a building, although in the mines there are typically 125 or 150 feet between the levels. Moments after we'd started to descend, the whole elevator began to shake. I grabbed the side of the elevator, terrified, but my dad only laughed and shouted up to the surface. “Don't worry,” he said, “the men just like to shake the winch to scare first-timers.”

After about ten minutes, the elevator slowed and stopped at a level about 2,000 feet below the surface. We stepped off into the dark, hot, dusty chamber and visited briefly with a few miners. My nervousness started to wear off as I listened to them talk and saw how enthusiastic they were about talking with my father. Soon we were back on the elevator, on our way down to the very bottom level, about 3,000 feet deep.

My teenage mind was quite impressed by the working area at the mine's floor. It was sweltering, and the workers were clad in little more than loincloths, boots, and helmets. As they advanced ever deeper into small tunnels that followed the mineral vein, they were tethered by a rope at the waist to a safety cable along the wall. They sweated incessantly and profusely in the intense heat, their arms dirty from the powder that clogged the air in the mine tunnels. The only light came from the miners' lamps and occasionally from some rudimentary light fixtures in the bottoms of the tunnels.

I was struck by the fact that humans could work in the bottom of a mine and extract metals and minerals under such high-risk conditions. I was in awe of the sacrifice and effort involved in moving about the mine despite the lack of space, oxygen, and light, entrusting your life to your own skills, or perhaps the benevolence of a higher being.

My father observed the working conditions within Real del Monte y Pachuca. He shook hands with the miners and asked them how they were feeling, what work they were doing, how the company and supervisors were treating them. He asked them to tell him anything that was bothering them. My father was reinforcing to me the way he thought a union leader should work. He liked to hear from the workers themselves, and unlike most of the men who owned the mines, he wasn't afraid to go into the dark and dangerous places where they labored.

When we left for the surface after nearly three hours and once again saw the light of day and felt the fresh air, I was shocked by the blazing light of the sun. We were given dark glasses before exiting; after hours in the bottom of the dark tunnels, a person's vision becomes accustomed to the low light. We had spent a while in the mine, but I was amazed thinking about how most miners spent eight full hours or more a day in the depths of the earth.

It was the first of many trips I would make down into mines with my father. Later I accompanied my father to mines in Chihuahua and Coahuila. I went down into the San Francisco del Oro and Santa Barbara mines, both in Chihuahua and both very deep. The working conditions were risky in these sites, but seeing them with my own eyes made me understand the courage of the miners, whose labor brings the wealth of the earth to the surface, where it can be used to benefit the people of Mexico.

We often ate at the bottom of the mine during these tours, dining on food offered to us by the miners, typically meat empanadas, steak or chicken pies, or corn tortillas filled with eggs, beans, and salsa, served with water or coffee that had been prepared at the surface. Eating three thousand feet below the ground gives the person a temporary illusion that he is working at a normal activity on the surface. We would sit in caves that had been transformed into makeshift dining rooms, complete with tables and chairs, where the miners ate halfway through their workday. They get a half-hour or forty minutes to eat, as established in the collective bargaining agreements at each mine. If one of these dining areas was unsafe or unhealthy—if the ventilation was poor, or the concentrations of gas and debris too high—Don Napoleón would demand that the mine owners correct it. He firmly believed that these men, who couldn't even go to the surface for a proper meal, at least needed hygienic dining areas.

The memory of my early mine visits were vivid in my mind during
the first days after the Pasta de Conchos collapse. I'd descended to the bottom of many coal mines, and I knew what it felt like down there. I remembered the feeling of being closed up inside the earth in tunnels brimming with throat-choking coal dust. I couldn't fathom what it would feel like to be trapped down there after such a collapse, with little or no hope of rescue.

The U.S. labor department has stated that since the beginning of mining, the extraction of coal and other ground minerals “has been considered one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.” The state of
Coahuila produces the vast majority of Mexico's coal, and coal mines like the one at Pasta de Conchos are considered among the most dangerous and complicated of all mines, primarily because of the amount of methane gas and carbon monoxide associated with coal extraction. These gases are odorless and colorless and act very subtly when breathed in and circulated in the miner's body. One becomes drowsy, and once unconsciousness occurs death can come slowly as one falls into a sleep from which there is no awakening. Coal mining also generates vast amounts of coal dust, and the danger is directly proportional to the degree of ventilation at the level where the worker is occupied. The greater the distance and depth from the entrance, the greater the amount of methane gas, coal dust, smoke, and heat, and the more critical the need for adequate ventilation.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the beginning of the twentieth, miners would protect themselves by bringing canary cages to the mines—the classic example of animals used as sentinels to ensure the safety of humans. If methane or carbon monoxide was present in dangerous quantities, the bird would die before the men felt the negative effects of the noxious gases, giving them time to escape the mine or put on gas masks.

The speed of the canary's death depended on the degree of concentration of the gas in the particular coal mine. When the percentage is below 0.09 percent, after being in the mine for an hour, the bird begins to feel initial pain. As the gas content increases to 0.15 percent, the canary begins to suffer weakness and general discomfort, and in eighteen minutes, the small bird falls from its perch. If the gas level increases to 0.20 percent, the pain is evident a minute and a half after exposure to the methane begins, and in less than five minutes the canary falls on the ground. Finally, with a degree of gas accumulation of 0.24 percent, the canary falls off its perch and dies in a short time: about two-and-a-half minutes.
¹

In those early days, workers were alerted by this primitive warning system and exited alive. It was unjust to the canary, of course, but it allowed many miners to escape from dangerous areas and preserve their health. It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that gas meters were developed to measure gas concentrations, which, in addition to saving miners' lives, also prevented the deaths of many more canaries.

As technology has advanced and as the price of metals and minerals has skyrocketed in the past decade—resulting in unprecedented profits for the owners of the mines—one would think that conditions in coal mines would have become increasingly safer. But mines only become safer when the companies that control them are willing to invest in that safety and when the government carries out its duty to inspect these facilities and compel the companies to make improvements when necessary. In Mexico, workers like those who died in the Pasta de Conchos collapse are treated like little more than those sentinel canaries, sent down into the belly of the earth without any reliable safeguards against death.

Pasta de Conchos was one of the worst-maintained and most
dangerous mining sites in Mexico at the time of the explosion. The situation inside the mine was terrible, and it is worth taking a look at the myriad ways Grupo México and General de Hulla—the contract company hired by Grupo México—repeatedly ignored warnings of the danger inside. These companies share responsibility for the loss of life, of both contractors and union members, when the explosion was touched off in Pasta de Conchos, but the final responsibility rests with Grupo México. Germán Larrea's company failed to oversee how its contractor was operating the mine, and the Mexican Constitution states that a company's responsibility for the safety of its facilities “continues even when the owner hires the worker through an intermediary.”

To enter the Mine 8 at Pasta de Conchos, one must pass through an inclined tunnel, descending by a concrete stairway that ends about four hundred feet underground, opening onto a passage that continues a mile and a half horizontally. The only way in or out of the mine was
through its single access tunnel, or
tiro
, which functioned as entrance and exit. Three tunnels begin at a vestibule at the bottom of the stairway, and each runs the length of the mine, connected at points by diagonal communication tunnels. These tunnels are approximately ten feet high and ten feet wide, no more. The workers would meet at the front vestibule, and a system of transport cars would carry them through the mine and let each worker off at the spot where he would be working that day. One of the three main tunnels contained coal transporter belts that extended to the exit, where there is a tower on the surface with a large hopper, from which the coal is transferred to the washing and coking plant on the outside. At the end of these tunnels there was a bigger vault where new coal deposits had been found, part of the constant search for more and better quality coal.

Pasta de Conchos is not a very deep mine, but its ventilation system was completely insufficient. A large fan installed in the main tunnel injected fresh air into the bottom of the mine, but the same air must return, now laden with gases and dust, out of the same passage. In a mine such as this, the miners are being poisoned, little by little. The deeper they go, the scarcer the oxygen becomes, and the more thick and toxic the air becomes. This one fan, in just one tunnel, was completely insufficient to freshen and oxygenate the air that the miners breathed as they moved away from the only entrance. To prevent suffocation, the workers use face masks, but the company frequently would not equip the masks with filters, rendering them useless. In these cases, the miners would simply go without them.

The gas meters that measured the concentration of methane gas were also defective and did not give accurate readings—and without those readings, all other safety precautions were useless. Many speculated that the methanometers used by the company were faulty, but access to them was tightly controlled. When miners asked to see the methane levels, they were shown broken meters or told that they'd already been checked. If the miners didn't believe the company, said the managers, they could quit. A rescue worker at Pasta de Conchos recorded gas levels between 95 and 103 percent after the explosion; normal conditions are 1.5 to 2 percent.

In addition to the poisonous gases that permeated the mine, in the farthest reaches of the mine's main tunnel the workers left behind a layer of coal dust a foot and a half high. As the coal was extracted, this remaining dust was concentrated until it formed a thick—and highly explosive—covering on the ground.

Lethal gas, excessive heat, and explosive coal dust are realities in any mine, but the operators of Pasta de Conchos took a perilous situation and turned it into a recipe for certain death. General de Hulla ordered miners to weld with a blowtorch in the depths of the mine, despite the abundant coal dust, which mimics gunpowder if ignited. Typically, the walls and partitions would be “powdered”—covered with inert powder to neutralize the coal's combustible nature, thus preventing explosions—at least once a month, but although this is a procedure fundamental to coal mining and had been recommended by Pasta de Conchos engineers, it had not been done. Had it been, at a monthly cost of around $10,000, the chain of coal detonations throughout the length of the mine would likely have been stopped. For Grupo México and its contractor, it was too high a price for the lives of its employees.

On top of this, the workers frequently wore shoes with holes in the soles as they walked on the sludge and accumulated dust. There were electrical faults in the transportation systems, in the cars that carried the miners to the bottom of the mine, and with the transporter belts that carried the minerals to the outside, toward the coal-processing plant. There were frequent discoveries of burned electrical cables with metal wires exposed, but instead of being repaired and insulated properly, they were haphazardly repaired with any tape that was available. This is especially risky in mines, since there are frequent water flows; such rudimentary installation of high-voltage electrical wires could allow dangerous electrical short-circuits and sparks that could cause a methane gas or coal dust explosion.