Digg ThisI’m not going to say that I told you so; that would be crass. But something was wrong on Tuesday night. My bride and I stayed up late to watch CNN’s coverage of the Sago mine disaster.
All day long, the news media, mining officials, neighbors, friends and family — and more — had been holding out hope for the miners, trapped some 10,000 feet inside a coal mine that was filled with three times the lethal concentration of carbon monoxide. As the day wore on, hope was fading.
All of that changed around midnight (it’s toward the end).
“They’re alive!” they said, “It’s a miracle!”
We sat on the living room couch, amazed at what we were seeing and hearing. The miners were alive and well, and were going to be taken out of the mine and directly to the church where their families had gathered, waiting for them. Families roused their children from their slumbers to take part in an historic event.
Happy faces were everywhere, as if to say, “see, coal mining’s a lot safer than it was before.” Then Anderson Cooper brought on Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical specialist, and asked him about what kind of condition the miners were in (later in that same transcript, but as of this writing, it’s not there yet).
Gupta reiterated what everyone else was saying: they would be suffering from hypothermia, dehydration, and possible CO poisoning, as well as any other possible bodily injuries sustained in the blast that precipitated the whole mess.
He also said something that stuck in my craw all night: that he was “very surprised” that the company would take the miners to their families instead of directly to the hospital where they could get the medical treatment that they needed.
Both Cooper and Gupta commented on how that seemed odd, that Standard Operating Procedure would dictate that they be taken for immediate medical treatment — but, what the heck? They ran with it; from all the reports they were getting, that was the story.
That little tidbit (about Standard Operating Procedure) stuck in my mind all night. In fact, I woke twice that night thinking that something was very wrong inside that mine. At 9:00 the next morning, we got a call from a close friend (we were still asleep), one of my bride’s assistants at the paper who had absolutely no business being awake at that hour, with the bad news.
It was that little tidbit that everyone, so full of joy at the great news, ignored.
Standard Operating Procedure. Three little words that, when you look back on the events of last Tuesday night, and list the critical points out in a list, blew the lid off the whole thing.
