Who, when, where, and ...

On January 7th the Discovery Times channel featured a new documentary about the deaths of the Sago miners. Its description of what the miners and their families went through was heartbreaking. But it left me frustrated and even angry at the producers for their failure to look into what could have been done to prevent the disaster, or at least to save the miners after the explosion occurred. At one point we heard that miners frequently pounded on steel beams in the hope that the sound would carry to the surface, and there was a machine in nearby Pittsburgh that would have enabled those on the surface to hear the pounding. But the documentary did not say another word about why the machines didn't get to Sago. Nor was there any explanation for the fact that the emergency oxygen supply only lasted an hour, or for the lack of emergency communication equipment in the mine. This was "sob sister" journalism, and I hope it will remind reporters not only of their duty to report what went wrong, but also to find out why it went wrong.