For refusing to declare the six unrecovered miners in the Crandall Mine collapse this past summer dead.
You know they’re dead. I know they’re dead. The families know they’re dead.
But the fucking State of Utah won’t declare them dead without bodies.
I tend to believe that sending more people into a mine that was unstable, to an area that no one had been able to reach, that no one had any indications that the miners were still alive, anyways, would have been a criminal act. But with the State of Utah refusing to declare the miners dead, my sympathy for the families who were talking about needing closure by seeing the mangled bodies of their dead has gone up quite a bit. Without a certificate of death: no life insurance will be paid; no wills can be probated; I imagine that survivor’s benefits, if any, are also being held up because of this, too. In fact, without that certificate of death, the spouses of the missing miners would have to get a divorce from a dead spouse if they wish to marry before the State will allow them to be presumed dead because of time passed. (I’m sure that would be laugh riot, too - divorce on the grounds of abandonment, of course. “Your Honor, he went into that mine back in August, 2007, and I haven’t seen him since - the bastard run out on me, our two kids, and his dog still waits for him. How could he be so cold to us?”)
It’s not like the mine collapse was completely predictable - even if the charges that the backmining lead to the instability that left the mine vulnerable to earthquake shock - there’s still no way to predict when the triggering earthquake was going to happen. And without that element of prediction, there’s no way anyone could have deliberately set up a fraudulent disappearance to get their death benefits, using this mine collapse.
I’m trying to contact the guy who wrote the AP article linked in the thread, but since he’s AP, I have to go through them. I’ll post here if I can get an answer about where to sent grassroots outrage to elected officials.
I sincerely doubt that some small-time dingus like Murray (I don’t care if the almighty Wikipedia sez his company is the 12th largest coal mining company in the US, trust me, he’s a nobody in the industry) is bribing the State of Utah to not declare the miners dead. If anyone wants to pursue that line, the next thing I’m going to post is “cite?”
My guess it’s just a stupid bureaucratic bit of dumbassery which will quickly be reversed once the media attention gets hot enough.
I imagine most of them are hourly, not salaried - so since they haven’t punched a time-clock in a few months, they’re not getting paid. Even if the miners were salaried, they’ve yet to check in for work since that day, so I’m sure that the company could make an argument for abandonment of the job. FTM, if the miners are still alive they’ve obviously skipped out of town, which means the mine can fire them. And if they are still alive, but fired, they can’t be any liability for the company. :rolleyes:
I don’t mean to dispute Una Persson’s judgment vis-a-vis Murray, nor the likelihood of any kind of collusion between the state officials involved in this decision and Murray, but I do think that it points to another reason why refusing to complete the paperwork to declare the miners dead is a really shitty thing to do.
Of course it’s a shitty thing. I’ll bet it’s a standard “person must be missing for X years without a body recovered to be declared dead” thing in Utah law. I don’t know, I’m just guessing.
Yes, and I gather they never punched out, so they’ve been on duty 24 hours a day since.
My point wasn’t to be facetious or to downplay the seriousness of the situation, just that if someone insists on maintaining a bureaucratic fiction, it’s not unreasonable to hit them with a claim based on that fiction. If the company claims the miners are still officially alive (using the government’s decision as a justification) as a means to avoid paying death benefits, the families should sue for 24-hour salary benefits, using the same governmental decision, and force a (hopefully independent) court to rule on the matter.
Additionally, why not file criminal charges claiming the corporation is committing unlawful confinement? If the men are still alive but the company won’t let them leave, can’t a reasonable claim of imprisonment be made? Get this into the courts by any means possible, as fast as possible.
Any word on where to send letters? This shouldn’t be, and since it is, we need to speak up so that it is changed. ETA: How do you submit story ideas to the BBC? I wonder what would happen if world news carriers published this fact?
Well, that’s my guess. You’ve got six payouts. That’s not going to be cheap. They don’t have to pay unless the men are declared dead. So I’ll bet someone’s calling in some favors in the state capital.