Lightning strike caused the Sago mine disaster?

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!!! I'm a science teacher, there's no way that lightning went 2 miles through the ground to cause that explosion!! The experts must have gotten paid off, because you can't sue God on that one. Somebody's pockets just got lined. I smell a rat the size of West Virginia. What do you guys think?

Lightning strike caused the Sago mine disaster?
Having come from that country I can easily share your views. I don't know about payoff, but the lightning bit sounds like a red herring.





I would love to know if the fire boss made the required inspection before miners went to work. I would guess not.
Reply:Yes it highly unlikely but possible. The lightning would have travel down the rail line or down a power line.





There is so much crap coming out to that investigation that you have ever right to doubt this too.
Reply:It’s possible. The mine shaft is not just a hole in the ground, you know. There are cables for electrical power and communications, which run all the way from the surface down to the bottom of the mine. Some of those are intended to draw away static electrical charges which cold lead to sparks and ignite a dust explosion. There are also pipes, for the purposes of pumping air in and water out. Those also reach all the way down from the surface to the bottom. Finally, there are girders, which support the mine shaft and the elevators that the men use to reach the lower levels.





All of those are metal, all are electrically conductive. Any one of them could have been struck by lightning and carry it down into the mine shaft where an explosion could have been set off. I suppose it would be a matter of looking at the instrumentation that was attached to them to monitor static charges and discharges to see which way it was flowing. If a huge charge was recorded as flowing down into the mine, that would indicate lightning rather than a discharge of normal static build up. But they had to dig down and recover the instruments, like recovering an airliner’s black box, and that takes time and effort.





Look up dust explosions and static discharge. You will find that this is one of the greatest dangers to miners, and there are lots of safety devices to help prevent it. But lightning is something powerful enough to overcome any man made protective device.





24 DEC 06, 0335 hrs, GMT.
Reply:cdf-rom has it right... and there always pockets of methane within the coal. It doesn't take much to cause the explosions.





And 2 miles? Where did you get that number? The deepest mine in North America is just over a mile underground (the Lucky Friday mine in northern Idaho). I'd be surprised if the Sago mine was more than 600 ft below the surface. Add that to the fact that the Sage mine was NOT a shaft mine. A shaft is a vertical excavation like a tunnel turned on it's end. All the tv footage showed the Sago mine to be an adit mine, a horizontal tunnel.





So, lightning strikes at the surface above the mine, enough discharge makes it to a shallow methane pocket, sets off a chain reaction, and causes the roof to collapse trapping the miners. A fire may have broken out, generating carbon monoxide and that is where the danger came from. If I remember right, the explosion went off near the conveyor belt and killed one miner at that point. There is NOTHING in a conveyor that can explode. The explosion itself did not kill the rest, the carbon monoxide did.





This is actually a pretty good report.


http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/105...

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