Today I finally got to work. I had a small job with a rad waste facility. It is not appropriate to go into details, but it break my hearts to see how people work. Four ten hour days plus an 8 hour day - 48 hours per week in full dress out. That means plastic suits and supplied air respirators or full face filter respirators, up to four layers of gloves, steel toed shoes, shoe covers, air lines to drag around, and glove boxes to fight. All this while bending, grasping ridiculous tools, lifting, and sweating in unairconditioned warehouses. I have seen workers in auto plants walking fast for 7 or even 10 miles a day - I calculate it - carrying 18 tons total. I have seen one man lift 40 tons per day, day ofter day, a little skinny guy smaller than me. I have seen workers cut and bleed right in front me, seen their scars, and amputations. I have listened to stories of workers who haven't had a day off in 70 days, 70 days straight in front of smelters with radiant heat like an oven, blinding light. My heart aches.
I read a blog today from Katie Granju, whom I like and respect, but this story is more than she notes. If you link, scroll down to the one from yesterday with the clean coal video.
Coal is complicated whether clean or dirty coal and there is a difference. It is about the sulfur content and the amount of resulting acid formation in the air. But that is not my point. I once had a job working on a strip mine in West Virginia with a guy named Dusty, seriously, third generation coal miner. His daddy was Rocky, swear to god. This is mountain top removal, a moonscape. I got some shit about working for them. But its not about the company, its about the people. I've worked for Haliburton too, good men on those oil rigs. Strip mining is one of the scariest jobs I've had, trucks bigger than a house. They once ran over a van, driver and all, because the van was too small to see from the drivers seat of the truck. I was helping blasters, men who carrying around fifty pound boxes of explosives and dig holes to set charges, bless their hearts, walking a moonscape, carrying death boxes in their arms and breaking their backs. But we need coal.
And I hate taking down a mountain. But I hate sending men down into mountains more. They die down there, in the dark. Men go into those mines and work for 20, 30 years, ten hour days under ground. In winter they never see the sun. I know the first female underground coal miner, an old lesbian, precious, too sick to work at all now.
Well, my point in all of this is everything you use, including energy, is made by a person, by their hands, by their backs. Coal is a hard life. We need new energy. Bitching about clean coal and arguing over word campaigns is stupid. We need tidal energy, solar energy, wind energy, hydroelectric dams, and lots more nuclear power plants. We should have been building them twenty years ago. We need to open up the waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain and quit bitching about the ten thousand year probabilities of containment. We need to help coal miners today. Coal is dirty. It gets in your skin and won't come out til you grow new skin. We need a vision, a new future. The little bitching is silly. The coal miners are real.
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