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The powers obviously were only as helpful as the safety rules.

And the safety rules had some problems.

In the late 1960s, roughly 200 American coal miners were dying on the job every year.

Half of those were killed by collapsing roofs,
and roughly half of those were killed while following the existing safety rules.

No one ever told Chris to invent better rules.

But before he even began to figure out better designs for coal mine pillars, he knew that was what he wanted to do:

He wanted to keep miners safe.

As he worked toward his PhD, he figured out that the only place to do it was inside the federal government.

The coal mining companies had largely dodged their responsibility.

Industry executives who visited Penn State made it clear to Chris that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.

And no one coal mining company was likely to fund the research that would benefit all coal companies.

Working on his thesis, right through the mid-1980s, Chris had offers to teach,
but he knew no university could guarantee him access to the mines he wanted to study.

“Plus, academia puts on a facade of being impartial but is in fact much more closely connected to industry than anything else,” he said.

“In some ways it is an arm of industry.”

He needed to find a job inside the federal government,
with either the Mine Safety and Health Administration or the Bureau of Mines.

The mine safety agency had been hit by the Reagan administration with a hiring freeze.

But the Bureau of Mines, still largely owned by the industry, had some money and knew about his research.

“I just kind of had an open door there,” said Chris.

“I’m not actually sure who even hired me.

I know I had one interview because I forgot a tie and had to stop off at Wal-Mart on the way to buy one.”

It was now 1987.

He was 31 years old, married and the father of a 1-year-old son.

He joined the bureau at its research facility outside of Pittsburgh.

Upon arrival, he sensed a certain wariness from his new colleagues.

No one else had a PhD.

No one else had studied with the great Bieniawski.

“They put me in a basement office that was way out of the way with a guy who was mentally unstable,” said Chris.

“Whenever I’d get a phone call, he’d start making these funny sounds.”

They also assigned him to the jobs no one else wanted
— week-long trips to gather data from coal mines in Kentucky.

None of it mattered;

he was the least likely human being on the planet to put on airs,
and what was pain to others was pleasure to him.

He didn’t even much care that his phone calls triggered at the desk beside him the honks of a braying donkey.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” said Chris.

“The idea of being able to spend weeks studying these longwall mines was fantastic.

And as soon as I got to the Bureau of Mines, I had no one to tell me what to do.

I even made up my own title:
Principal Roof Control Specialist.”

He began with the problem he’d been attacking in his still-unfinished PhD thesis:

roof collapse inside longwall coal mines.

Evaluating the safety of a coal mine roof was less like evaluating the safety of a suspension bridge than it was predicting the performance of baseball players.

No matter what you did, you were going to be wrong some of the time:

The best you could do was improve the odds of success.

And the way to do this was to collect lots of data from roof failures
and search for patterns.

Much later, he’d explain his approach in a paper:

“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering.

Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation,
where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength.

Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums,
and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar.

Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability,
which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”

His new job came with a badge that granted him access to any mine he wished to study.

The Bureau of Mines also kept records of deadly roof failures along with important details:

the mine’s depth, the size and shape of its pillars, the nature of the rock in the roof, and so on.

Oddly, no one was really searching for meaning in the numbers.

“They had all this data but weren’t doing much with it,” said Chris.

The phenomenon had also occurred in baseball and, I’d bet, in other fields, too.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it.

People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure.

But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.