My grandfather was a coal miner in the North-East of England, a “howkah” whose job entailed squatting in a shaft about 3′ high, hacking (“howking”) coal out of the coalface with a pickaxe. His disgust at the danger of this occupation (which killed him in the end through black lung) ensured that my father did not go down the “pit” and instead trained as an electrician. I always found it strange during the miners’ attempted coup against Mrs Thatcher in the early 1980s that they said they were fighting to keep mining jobs open for their children.

Nevertheless, mine safety in the developed world has reached such levels where, as Jonah says, one incident can have a significant effect on the safety statistics, the background fatality rate being so low. You can see that clearly here. Federal regulation seems to have had little effect – the fatality rate was unaffected by the Coal Mine Safety Act of 1952. The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 may have had an effect, but after the Mine Safety Act of 1977 fatality rates did not decrease for about another ten years. Senator Byrd and colleagues should remember that.

Yet sub-surface mining remains an inherently hazardous occupation. Strip mining is far safer, but, once again, we have environmental lobbying and regulations that ensures that men are sent into the bowels of the earth in shafts to dig coal out laterally rather than extracting it by the simpler measure of digging straight down.