Centralia Based on Your Reading of the Case Study

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Centralia

Based on your reading of the case, what do you see as the central causes of the tragedy in "The Blast in Centralia No. 5"? Why did these problems develop?

The central cause of the tragedy -- if not the immediate cause -- was probably a form of bureaucratic inertia, combined with a sort of systemic corruption among interacting systems of the state and federal governments, its relevant regulatory agency, and both management and labor hierarchies. The immediate cause was the failure of the chain of command to observe proper precautions after having received warnings from multiple sources. It is worth noting that the safety inspector for the mine, Scanlan, was extremely conscientious. He had also identified the Centralia No. 5 mine as "the worst in his district." And as Martin notes, Scanlan had identified the various malpractices as prevalent in the mine "more than five years before the mine blew up as a result (at least in part) of those very malpractices." (Martin 32). Even though workers had complained repeatedly to both state and management, they found themselves "rebuffed" by the state and to their own union -- but in the matter of the clean-up that would have prevented an explosion, Martin notes that "one cannot discern any labor-management cleavage at all but only what would be called in party politics bi-partisan deals" (Martin 35). However, due to the unusual circumstances relating to a labor strike and government nationalization of the industry, the safety of the mine had suddenly been brought under direct federal jurisdiction: but the new regulatory enforcement agency failed to take any action, and the unusual circumstances prevented any possibility of a labor strike to refuse to work under the persistently unsafe conditions.

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But in some sense, it is the larger bureaucratic system that Martin indicts -- he notes that "the miners at Centralia, seeking somebody who would heed their conviction that their lives were in danger, found themselves confronted with officialdom, a huge organism" (Martin 43). The shifting bureaucratic systems which handled regulation and enforcement of regulations basically "forever passed from hand to hand a stream of memoranda and letters, decisions and laws and rulings, and they lost their own identities." (Martin 43). Blame cannot be placed on any single aspect of the bureaucracy, but on the interaction of all the separate bureaucratic systems, which permitted it to be possible to put off indefinitely a closure of the mine for safety violations which had been reported repeatedly for years.

What reforms would you recommend to prevent the tragedy from reoccurring elsewhere? How could such reforms be implemented?

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