Better Not to See Such Miracles

By Fridtjof Sobanski & Zhu Yue

At the beginning of April, all the Chinese people focused on the Wangjialing Coal Mine in Shanxi, China. A race with the grim reaper was going on there!

On the afternoon of March 28, underground water gushed in the pit of Wangjialing Coal Mine at about 1:40 pm, trapping 153 coal miners inside the mine. A rescue was started soon after the accident. The lives of the trapped coal miners worried all the people in China.

Government officials, rescue experts, soldiers, fire fighters, policemen, medical staff as well as ordinary people gathered in the sites, contributing their minds and strengths to the rescue. With massive efforts, the first nine trapped coal miners were rescued at 10 pm on April 4th. Then good news came one after another. At last, 115 coal miners had been successfully rescued and sent to the hospitals, after surviving in the underground coal mine for 9 days without food, water or sunshine.

People call this “miracle of lives”. On the one hand we applaud for the efforts and hard work of the rescuers; we are moved by the coal miners’ strong will to survive and we admire the care of the whole country for these people. But on the other hand we should not be blinded by the applause, tears and the “miracle”. I believe that no one wants to go through such a “miracle” again. Therefore, the primary task after the rescue should be finding the reason of the accident as well as a way to avoid it.

It is known that the accident in the Wangjialing Coal Mine was caused by the “hurry” of China National Coal Group Corp. (hereafter China Coal), which is the owner of Wangjialing Coal Mine. In order to improve its competitive power, China Coal sent 14 groups of coal miner into the Wangjialing Coal Mine and made them operate day and night. But they ignored the related safety measures which finally resulted in the tragedy.

“Safety production” is always on the list of Chinese central government’s core work. The government has already set up special department to regulate and supervise this matter. Coal mining is where the “safety production” attaches great importance. Shanxi, which is famous for its abundant storage of high-quality coal, has been haunted by frequent coal mine accidents. Collapse, gas explosion and underground water gushing pose threat to the coal miners’ safety and lives from time to time. People call the coal from Shanxi the “bloody coal”.

Both the central government and local government have been attaching great importance to the safety production in coal mines. In 2009, the Shanxi provincial government started to merge the private-owned coal mines into the big, established state-owned coal companies, because most of the accidents happened to these private mines, which lacked enough safety measures and monitoring, in the past. The government proceeded strictly with the schedule and even the temporary recession of GDP could not lessen their determination.

But is that enough? The Wangjialing Coal Mine accident speaks for itself. The state-owned companies, like China Coal, also made mistakes on the “safety production”. The government should put the concept of “safety production” and relevant policies into the minds of all the people engaged in coal mining. Everyone, from the chief executive of coal mine companies to the ordinary coal miner, should place safety, not the benefits, at the first place. They must hold strong respect for people’s lives instead of the money.

We appreciate the “miracle of lives” in the Wangjialing Coal Mine, but we have to say: “The fewer miracles of that kind, the better for people’s lives!”