They will go unnamed.

As far as industrial accidents go, mining-related disasters bother me the most I’m sure. Trapped with dwindling food and water, hearing the men on the other side trying to come to rescue, buried alive under thousands of tons of rock, having hours and sometimes days to contemplate the end and no way to hasten the inevitable. Of course rescue-in-the-nick-of-time is a possibility, but in the darkness with the oxygen choked out of the black, it must be difficult to gauge the passing of the minutes to determine how much longer to hold on for. There is no death that can be worse than this, nothing short of horror as the current disaster in Utah is unfolding to be.

In the news articles I was perusing yesterday I noticed an absence of names. The names of the trapped and possibly-living men underground. What made me notice it first of all was a reference to the Senator of Utah not being able to communicate with the families because of a language barrier (and so instead using some universal sign of sympathy – hands folded over the heart – to communicate to them connection with their loss). And so I thought, many of these miners are probably from latino backgrounds and went to try and confirm this (an interesting demographic shift from the mining culture of only two decades ago), but could not. Could not because the names of the men are nowhere to be found in the news articles.

A curious thing, though not suprising given the expendability of immigrant labour in North American society, not to mention the overall denigration of working class jobs and the individuals who do them. Never mind that we must all know the name of the mine owner, Robert Murray, a man who refuses to discuss the 300 safety violations this mine has racked up since 2004 and is allowed to dominate media time with his denial that “retreat mining” was taking place on the site (one of the most dangerous practices in modern mining). At first I thought this was just the bias of the media and how it’s been covering the story.

But today I read something quite different in the Denver Post online – which is that the company is not only refusing to release the names of the trapped men, but is blocking media access to the families of them and has put a gag order on every other employee from the site.

But then, it is easier to engage in excuses and denials when victims remain unnamed and there are no counter-voices to the “truth” splayed across the nightly news cameras. It’s the way spin works, and in this case the company holds all the cards (how have they kept the families from talking to the media? offers of money? survivor benefits? certainly they have told their employees that speaking to the media will equal losing their jobs). It is shameful thus, that the miners are to remain nameless as they suffocate slowly, depersonified as the mine owner becomes larger than life nightly, a compassionate man driven to ensure the rescue proceeds. With whom are we then forced to identify? Of course. The owner. Again. We identify with. Rather than the horror of dying anonymous and alone. It’s safer that way.