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FEATURE: The deadly results of China's fast growing demand for coal

Digging coal deep underground, Luo Xianglai learned to listen hard to the sounds the rocks made when struck with his pick-axe.

A dull thud usually meant solid rock and safety. A whistling noise signaled an impending cave-in.

"Usually you could tell it was coming," said Luo, a squat, 33-year-old with broad-shoulders, a buzz cut and a worried look. "The rocks would start singing, letting off a whistling sound. We would get out in a rush."

On a cold December day two years ago, the rocks did not sing. A cave-in buried Luo under fallen ceiling planks and more than 2m of rock, 100m down a mine shaft. His right leg was crushed, ending his brief mining career and returning him to the life of an impoverished farmer -- this time, with a steel rod inserted in his leg.

Coal mining remains one of the world's most dangerous trades. In China, a fast-growing economy and heavy demand for cheap energy have combined in a deadly way. By official count, more than 4,700 died last year in Chinese coal mines.

The coal industry is booming worldwide, driven by economic growth in China and India and by a return to coal for electric power generally, including in the US. While Chinese miners toil for a couple hundred dollars a month, mine owners in Taiyuan, the sooty capital of Shanxi Province, drive BMWs and invest in real estate in the capital city of Beijing.

Miners themselves are often complicit in the deadly bargain. Accidents are hushed up. Miners fear reprisals if they report them. And some do not want to see their mine shut down for an accident investigation, depriving them of work.

"Some miners fear poverty more than mining disasters," said Cao Yu (曹渝), a senior at Hunan Normal University who conducted surveys among miners in Hunan Province in 2005 and last year. "Mining accidents create great stress. For them an accident means a colleague has departed the world but it also means the mine will stop work."

Even in wealthy nations, where mining is more mechanized and safety regulations are better enforced, risks remain. And as mining booms, it often leads to increased risk -- and deaths.

The US has had three major fatal accidents in the last two years. In the most recent one, workers were digging out coal that previously had been judged too dangerous to mine.

The collapse in August left six miners presumed dead at Utah's Crandall Canyon Mine. US federal inspectors had warned of deteriorating conditions, though another federal agency had approved the work.

"Mining is inherently high risk and will always remain so as long as it is done by people," said Dave Feickert, an independent mine safety consultant based in New Zealand, who has worked extensively in China. "All underground mines face the same problems. It takes eternal vigilance to stay on top of it."

In northern India, 50 miners died in a methane gas explosion last year in the hilly coal country around Dhanbad. Small operators cut corners, putting profits ahead of safety, inspectors and miners say.

"We are often trapped in the coal mines during monsoon," said Jeetan Ram, who recalled a mine flood that drowned 29 fellow miners in 2001. "We are at the mercy of the rain god."

The death toll in China is on another scale. By official count, 4,746 workers died last year in coal mines. China's fatal accident rate of two deaths per million tonnes of coal mined is 50 times higher than the US' and nine times that of India.

Many more deaths and injuries go unreported at China's smaller mines, which routinely cover up accidents.

Badly injured, Luo was driven to a hospital three hours away to hide the incident. To this day, the mine denies there ever was an accident.

Efforts to buttress mine safety are being made worldwide. A fatal methane gas explosion at a West Virginia mine in early last year set off a flurry of new regulation in the US.

Likewise, China has cracked down on unsafe practices in the past two years, bringing down the number of deaths by 20 percent from a peak of nearly 7,000 in 2002, even as coal production has increased.

Until 1998, China's state-run Huainan Mining Group, which mines coal seams containing high amounts of dangerous methane gas, had an explosion almost every year.

"We had no good methods, no technology to control the gas," said Yuan Liang, a senior Huainan executive who investigated a 1997 blast that killed more than 130 miners.

Even today, gaps remain. US safety inspectors acknowledge that they failed to carry out mandated quarterly inspections at every underground mine this year.

A new federal law requires air packs, devices that give miners about an hour's worth of oxygen in an emergency; while 125,000 have been distributed, an equal number remain on back order.

In China, the progress has come mainly at large, state-owned mines, the best of which now have safety levels approaching western standards.

But 80 percent of the casualties occur at small operations, many of which dodge government crackdowns, often aided by local officials who sometimes are part-owners.

It was into that world that Luo entered. Raised in an isolated valley of terraced fields, 35km down a dirt road that hugs mountainsides, Luo never thought about becoming a miner.

For a century, ever since his ancestors migrated north to the central China town of Chang'gou -- a name that literally means "long gulch" -- farming small plots of wheat and corn has been the way of life.

But China's economic boom has generated previously unimagined opportunities in the cities -- and created a growing income divide between urban areas and the still poor countryside.
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