An extremely long WaPo article (not paywalled) (about 11,000 words) discusses the work of an obscure bureaucrat, Christopher Mark, working for the federal Department of Labor. Chris developed the math and statistical analysis to make roof collapses in coal mines less frequent. His work has saved thousands of lives. If this is too TL/DR for you, just scan some of it and the five points I make at the end.
The Canary
The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner. .... Mark was born in 1956, the eldest of three sons of a civil engineer named Robert Mark [an engineering professor at Princeton].Coal mining had long been the most dangerous job in the United States. At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured. (And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.) Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job — roughly 50,000 people — had been killed by falling roofs. In his classes at Penn State, Chris saw at least one reason for that: The coal mining industry had learned to see the problem as the cost of doing business.
His rock mechanics professor was a Polish aristocrat named Z.T. Bieniawski. .... [Bieniawski] was a fabulous professor — the sort of teacher who got you thinking even when he didn’t mean to. One day he lectured his students on the formulas used to design the pillars that supported the roofs of coal mines — which of course sounds like a topic to light a fire under no one. But it lit a fire under Chris. He’d experienced roof collapse. He knew that poorly designed pillars killed people. Now he learned that the formulas used to create them were all over the map. “A kid in class raised his hand,” said Chris. “He asked, ‘which of these formulas is the right one?’” As Bieniawski had created one of the formulas, the professor’s answer seemed almost modest. “You need to use your engineering judgment,” he replied. But that can’t be right, thought Chris. Each formula implied a different pillar design than the others. At most only one could be right. When wrong, coal miners died. Yet no one had figured out which formula was best or really even saw the problem. “I said, this is the place for me!” said Chris.He graduated in 1981 without a clear idea of where to go next. He had a serious interest (mine safety) but no obvious place to express it. He worked for a spell with an engineering consulting firm in Chicago but found it dull and beside the point.The body of a coal miner aftera tunnel cave-inThen Bieniawski called to say that he’d just received new funding for a PhD student. He wanted Chris to be that student. All Chris needed was a thesis topic. The coal mining industry soon supplied it. On Dec. 19, 1984, a roof collapsed inside the Wilberg Mine, just outside of Salt Lake City. The miners at Wilberg had been trying to break the world record for the most coal mined in a single day. Nine senior officials from the mine’s owner, Utah Power and Light, had entered the mine to witness history. Suddenly, a fire broke out in one of the two main tunnels. Before the executives or 18 working coal miners could escape, the roof in the second tunnel collapsed and blocked their exit. All 27 people wound up trapped inside an inferno. It would take a year to recover their bodies. And Christopher Mark thought: If they’d figured out the right formula for their pillars, they’d all still be alive.“Pillar Design For Longwall Mining” would be the subject of his PhD thesis and the title of his first paper. Bad pillar design was killing longwall coal miners. It’s what killed 27 people in the Wilberg Mine. It had killed miners since longwall mining had been invented in the 1940s. It had also cost the coal industry money. .... “The same roof fall that can kill miners can also cost a lot of money,” Chris said. And yet even though the coal mine industry had a huge financial incentive to figure out how to solve the problem, it hadn’t solved it.The powers obviously were only as helpful as the safety rules. And the safety rules had some problems. In the late 1960s, roughly 200 American coal miners were dying on the job every year. Half of those were killed by collapsing roofs, and roughly half of those were killed while following the existing safety rules.
No one ever told Chris to invent better rules. But before he even began to figure out better designs for coal mine pillars, he knew that was what he wanted to do: He wanted to keep miners safe. As he worked toward his PhD, he figured out that the only place to do it was inside the federal government. The coal mining companies had largely dodged their responsibility. Industry executives who visited Penn State made it clear to Chris that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers. And no one coal mining company was likely to fund the research that would benefit all coal companies. Working on his thesis, right through the mid-1980s, Chris had offers to teach, but he knew no university could guarantee him access to the mines he wanted to study. “Plus, academia puts on a facade of being impartial but is in fact much more closely connected to industry than anything else,” he said. “In some ways it is an arm of industry.” He needed to find a job inside the federal government, with either the Mine Safety and Health Administration or the Bureau of Mines. The mine safety agency had been hit by the Reagan administration with a hiring freeze. But the Bureau of Mines, still largely owned by the industry, had some money and knew about his research. “I just kind of had an open door there,” said Chris. “I’m not actually sure who even hired me. I know I had one interview because I forgot a tie and had to stop off at Wal-Mart on the way to buy one.” It was now 1987. He was 31 years old, married and the father of a 1-year-old son.He joined the bureau at its research facility outside of Pittsburgh. Upon arrival, he sensed a certain wariness from his new colleagues. No one else had a PhD. No one else had studied with the great Bieniawski. “They put me in a basement office that was way out of the way with a guy who was mentally unstable,” said Chris. “Whenever I’d get a phone call, he’d start making these funny sounds.” They also assigned him to the jobs no one else wanted — week-long trips to gather data from coal mines in Kentucky. None of it mattered; he was the least likely human being on the planet to put on airs, and what was pain to others was pleasure to him. He didn’t even much care that his phone calls triggered at the desk beside him the honks of a braying donkey. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” said Chris. “The idea of being able to spend weeks studying these longwall mines was fantastic. And as soon as I got to the Bureau of Mines, I had no one to tell me what to do. I even made up my own title: Principal Roof Control Specialist.”
Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”
To set the record straight — and maybe also to start a fight with an academic he was bound to win — Chris wrote a long and debate-ending letter to Technology and Culture. As it happened, he knew the journal well. His father had been its editor.
Chris Mark in an Alabama mine, next to a chunk of rock that fell into the walkway from a nine-foot-high sidewall because a bolt meant to hold it in place wasn't long enough
I asked Chris a question that plainly irritated him. .... “Is it normal for someone in your job to write academic history papers?” .... His papers — mostly nitty-gritty descriptions of his research inside coal mines — have made him, by a factor of two, the world’s most cited mining engineer. “I never wrote an academic paper,” he said, a bit sharply. “Not one. They’re technical papers.” He caught himself and explained that he saw himself not as an academic but a solver of practical problems. “I have an absolute allergy to academic elitism,” he said, but finally added. “No, it’s not normal.”
That is a small part of this fascinating article. The article goes on at great length about what Chris did. Because of his work, 2016 was the first year in American history that no coal miners died in roof collapse accidents. A few points are worth knowing:
- Before Chris, regardless of their contrary propaganda, mine companies did not care about safety, they cared about profit
- Federal regulatory agencies were captured and controlled by the mine industry
- Relevant parts of academia were captured and controlled by the mine industry
- Chris never considered himself to be an academic - he distrusted and hated academic elitism - he saw himself as a problem-solving technician, not an academician
- No matter how vehemently the American authoritarian radical right wealth and power movement denies it, work like what Chris has done is squarely targeted for extinction by Project 2025 -- DJT will fire people like Chris who cannot be bought off or otherwise corrupted -- Chris is part of the evil deep state that American authoritarians want to get rid of
