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Wallace, Idaho – Just when was it
that the United Snakes of America declared war on the Coeur d'Alene Mining
District, and why?
We were ruminating, fulminating on these
weighty questions last week. Pretty clearly, the opening salvo was fired in
the final decade of the 19th Century, when Federal troops were
dispatched under a declaration of martial law to lock up 600 miners here who
were striking for decent wages.
Then of course during World War II there
was the undeclared conscription of lead and zinc miners here who were
prevented from taking better paying jobs in the shipyards of Puget Sound to
keep wresting rocks from our earth that could be smelted into bullets and
cartridges to kill Germans and Japanese.
For that trouble, we were rewarded, in
1984, by being declared a federal Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency and we have been struggling under the EPA's yoke ever since
– as have some 70 mining companies who produced bullet-makings for the
government in the 1940s, most of them mom-and-pop operations. Or was it in
1991, when agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation swooped down upon
us, shutting down our card games and seizing our slot machines, in their
assault on our laissez-faire way of life?
Was it just last year, when the US EPA
sweated a $200 million settlement out of Hecla Mining Co. for alleged
“environmental damages” for having the temerity to mine silver,
lead and zinc in the Silver Valley? (That amount, ironically, is about what
Hecla intends to spend extending the life of the Lucky Friday by some 30
years.)
Or was it just last week, when the
federal Mine Safety and Health Administration shuttered the Lucky Friday mine
for up to a year on an utterly vacuous claim that is main vertical access
way, the Silver Shaft, had miraculously become unsafe – overnight? This
is the same MSHA that inspects the shaft every three months, most recently a
month ago. What changed in 30 days to render the Silver Shaft unserviceable?
According to MSHA, 30 years' accumulation of crud leaking from sand lines
that have built up along the mile-deep, 18-foot cylindrical shaft's concrete
liner.
This is federal government arrogance at
its height. It is brazen and it reeks of ass-covering. It is also ineptitude
at its height, to the detriment of some 200 Hecla Mining Co. employees and a
like number of Cementation Corp. contract workers who were at work sinking
the new No. 4 Shaft internal winze. As of late last
week, Hecla miners were barred by MSHA even from maintaining the critical
pumps to keep water out of the lower workings of the Lucky Friday, where most
of the machinery is. The 4 Shaft is collared on the 4,900-foot level and most
of the current ore hauling was being done on the 5,900-level to the Silver
Shaft.
Miners tell this reporter that scaling-off
accumulations of sand-line leaks has been an ongoing maintenance procedure
since the Silver Shaft – unique to a district where wood-lined,
rectangular (and infinitely more maintenance-intensive) shafts are the norm
– was commissioned in 1983. Hecla, treading lightly, says it doesn't
consider the MSHA closure order politically motivated. We beg to differ. It
is all about politics. In the wake of the April, 2011 death of drift-miner
Pete Merek on the 5900-level, MSHA directed Hecla
to re-route that heading into uncharted territory. Following MSHA's orders
led to a pair of rock-bursts in November and December last year, the latter
of which injured seven men.
Our friendly local miners figure that
MSHA's order to close the Silver Shaft is directly connected to its mandated
screw-ups on the 5900 – essentially to distract attention from the
injuries the agency's order caused. Some early scuttlebutt that MSHA had been
pestering Hecla to clean up the Silver Shaft likely is rumour-mongering by
the federal agency. But MSHA doesn't pester: it writes citations, issues
orders and demands fines; it doesn't give advice.
Years ago MSHA was staffed by inspectors
who'd spent years underground breaking rock for a
living. They knew the art of the possible and the practical, and could with
considerable moral authority cite a company that was bending the rules to the
detriment of safety. The new breed of cat is different: college boys with
little or no experience in the reality of hard-rock mining. The hard-rock
miners they are ostensibly there to protect hold their ineptitude and their
rule-book rigidity in contempt.
So, 3.5 million ounces of silver
production from the Lucky Friday will be held off the books of America's
export balance sheet this year. Our silver consumption will continue at or
above its current rate, so we'll have to import more silver, and print more
paper dollars to pay for it – which just drives up the price of milk
and gasoline for all of us and the 400-plus miners now on the bricks.
No doubt some Goldman-Sachs-style
short-seller made off like a bandit when the MSHA order caused Hecla's stock
to crater from $6 to nearly $4 in a day's trading last week. Given the cozy
cronyism between Wall Street and the United Snakes Government these days,
might we wonder if more than just politics were involved?
This wasn't a war that the hardy people
of northern Idaho started, back in the 1890s, or the 1980s, the 1990s, or
just last week. We'd rather be known as the culture that brought decent
working conditions, women's suffrage, and other enlightenments to the
nation's conscience. But it is a fight we need to finish, and finish
decisively.
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