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The standard story
— the story accepted by the coal mine industry
— was that new technology had led inexorably to greater safety.

What had happened was far more interesting
— and told you how this little American subculture worked,
rather than the way economists who had never seen the inside of a coal mine might imagine that it worked.

Roof bolts were indeed more efficient and effective than timber supports in preventing chunks of roof from wounding miners.

But they were expensive to install.

The coal mine companies had, in effect, figured out how few roof bolts they needed to use to maintain the same level of risk their miners had endured before their invention.

“Simply stated,” Chris wrote, “roof bolts can only prevent roof falls if enough of them are installed.”

And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines
while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury.

Taking advantage, essentially, of people conditioned to a certain level of risk by failing to ameliorate that risk.

“No one puts people’s lives at risk per se,” Chris said.

“It’s not obvious most of the time that people’s lives are at stake.

You’re always playing probabilities.

But they knew what they were doing.

They could see people dying.

Even in a union mine they did it.

That is what is so extraordinary.

These were not dumb guys.

This was a conscious decision.”

If coal mine companies had played the odds with miners’ lives,
it was because they felt they couldn’t afford not to.

Any mine that installed a safe number of roof bolts would find itself at a competitive disadvantage to any mine that didn’t.

It had been a race to the bottom,
and until Chris created his database and made his study,
no one had really noticed what had happened.

If working-class families in West Virginia were angry but didn’t know quite where to direct their feelings,
here was a road map.

Their society had just assumed it could foist risk upon them without anyone ever really noticing or caring.

But someone had noticed.

The point of the roof bolt story was that,
left to itself,
the free market would fail to protect ordinary workers
— even when it clearly had the wherewithal to do so.

A mining company called Murray Energy soon proved the point.

Just before 3 in the morning of Aug. 6, 2007, the pillars collapsed inside of its Crandall Canyon mine in Emery County, Utah.

Crandall Canyon was especially deep:

Six miners were trapped 2,000 feet underground.

Three rescue workers were killed trying to save them.

The bodies of the six miners were never recovered.

The subsequent investigation and Senate hearings and criminal trials would last for years,
but it took Chris less than a day to work out what had happened:

The company had ignored his formula for pillar design.

As the pillars were made of coal, the fewer of them you left standing, the more coal you could remove.

Murray Energy wanted more coal, and to get it, the company had hired an engineering consultant who persuaded a regional mine inspector to sign off on a pillar scheme that Chris’s formula would have flagged as wildly risky.

“This is one where it should have saved lives but didn’t,” said Chris.

“They ran my algorithm.

They knew they had a problem.

They said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.’ ”

“The short answer to the question of what happened at Crandall Canyon is that the people in the Western coal fields had this deep-seated idea that the rules from the East didn’t apply to them,” said Chris.