Here is a link to a news report no blogger could resist.  The first sentence reads:

Two companies from Utah and one from Kansas have filed a petition to try to force into bankruptcy court the mining company owned by the polygamous Kingston clan.

It is all rather murky to say the least.  Here is one of the less reliable reports:

One of Kingstons’s most profitable enterprises is a bituminous coal and lignite mine in Huntington (Carbon County), which at one time brought in revenues of $ 1 million a month.

Apparently the clan has these two mining companies:  C.W. Mining and  Co-op Mining.     I could find nothing about them on Google other than records of seemingly innumerable legal disputes.  Let us know if you know more. 

A number of times last year, at mines all over the globe, there was an failure:  something happened on the mine and somebody died; something happened on the mine and there was an environmental impact; something happened and somebody was blamed, excoriated, or fired. 

I suspect that deep in human nature is the belief that every accident has a culprit.  I suspect that deep in human nature is the instinct to find the culprit, convict him (or her), and sacrifice them on the altar of blame and blood.

But in thinking about some of 2007’s spectacular mine-related failures, I wonder if maybe  many of them have no culprit.  Maybe many of them are the result of mere lapses by nice people.  Maybe many of them are what may be called “system failures.”  Maybe even where people died or we now can predict a 1,000 years of negative geomorphological impact, there is nobody so silly, negligent, or culpable that they should be marched to the altar of blame. 

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