Nine dead at Sutatausa: gas, ventilation and a warning already on file

BOGOTÁ — Nine miners were killed and six injured in a gas explosion at the Carbonera Los Pinos mine in Sutatausa, about 45 miles north of Bogotá, on May 4. The National Mining Agency attributed the blast to a buildup of gases. The miners were working at least 600 metres underground.

Colombia's mining agency had issued risk-control recommendations for the site weeks earlier. That detail is the story. Not that the mine was illegal — it was a legally operated mine — but that a regulator had already named the hazard and the hazard still killed nine people.

Colombian coal accidents are routinely traced to ventilation, and the country's small and medium mines often rely on single-circuit air with no continuous monitoring. Deep workings, methane, and a fan that is not instrumented is a combination that has killed miners in every coal country on earth.

The U.S. equivalent is a ventilation plan that exists on paper and a section that is over-ventilated only on the days the examiner walks it. Federal law requires an air reading before work and every shift; nothing about the requirement produces the reading.

Six men came out alive because the rescue was fast. That is a fact about luck, not about a program.