Smoking in Coal Mines

Sawah Lunto, Sumatra

I really did some terrible things to my children when they were young. I placed them in dangerous situations, mainly because I never fully appreciated that sometimes, when you trust others to keep things safe, your trust is not well placed.

I was reminded of this when I read that dozens of miners were killed after a methane gas blast in a coal mine in Sawah Lunto, West Sumatra, in June 2009.  I was not surprised. My son Robin and I went there in 1986, when I was doing some consulting work for an Australian coal mining company operating in Kalimantan.

The management wanted me to check out operations in Padang province and hence our visit to Sawah Lunto. I took Robin along for the ride. I would have taken my daughter, Allison, but back then, ladies were not allowed in the mines!

The mining tragedy I read about was not unexpected. When Robin and I went there, along with a colleague from Kaltim Prima Coal near Sangatta, Kalimantan, we were appalled. Work safety standards seemed to have been considered unnecessary.

Sadly, it was not only in that particular mine; in some of the larger government run mines nearby we got the same feeling. The difference between government and foreign owned mines was amazing.

I come from a mining town and have been a miner, so I know a little about mining. Although I never worked with coal, I knew for example, that you never carried naked flames or smoked in a coal mine especially. I expected the same awareness in Sawah Lunto.

The start of the visit was promising. The mine management issued us with smartly pressed, overly starched overalls, helmets and the usual paraphernalia for going down dark mines and we walked down the adit to the workface. It was not a long journey: maybe a kilometer or so. The overalls were so stiff I assumed they had been over starched. How wrong I was!

We chatted with our guide as we walked down. Rubbish littered the sides of the drive which made me think, aha, this is a ‘road’ and this is Indonesia. Compared to the standard of Australian mines where anally retentive safety managers insist on keeping the place cleaner than a baby’s bum this was appalling. I even noticed a couple of kerosene lamps. As luck would have it, they were not lit.

There seemed to be very little actual work going on. We arrived at a spot where the miners were resting. I think they did a lot of that. They were having a tea break.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ one asked and my companion and I were horrified when four of them lit up clove cigarettes.

Ye gods! In a coal mine? We politely declined and asked our guide if we could look elsewhere. In fact we moved off as quickly as we could, refusing the invitation to watch them working at the coal face.

My colleague, who was a mining safety engineer, started to write his report the minute we saw sunlight.

Basically it said: ‘NEVER GO DOWN THIS MINE!’ He only needed one reason.

We visited a couple of other mines to see if things were any better. We found the same thing. We decided we would not look any further for inspiration or appropriate Indonesian practice and returned to Padang.

As we drove, the three of us began to scratch. Something was biting us and when I say biting us, I mean we were being eaten alive. By the time we arrived back at our hotel in Padang we were covered in welts. Robin was in a particularly bad way. We continued to scratch away till we got back to Jakarta the following day.

We went to see the doctor. We had scabies. What was the solution? We had to shave our bodies all over. Once we did that we were advised to cover our whole body with some dreadful cream and not to let our skin breathe for a few days.

It worked. I asked about my concerns re expiring. I had read of people who covered themselves in paint in the name of art but had to leave a small breathing patch somewhere. The doctor looked at me as if I was some kind of kinky weirdo.

Now where do you think we got those scabrous nasties from? The overalls at the mine. Apparently they don’t overly wash used overalls, just dry them in the sun. No wonder they had a rather odd smell. The fact that they felt like cardboard was partly due to the fact that they hosted thriving colonies of lice and scabies who found unwashed sweaty overalls ideal for colonization.

Next time you want to visit a coalmine in Padang, take your own overalls.

And a portable bomb shelter.