Real-Life Decision Making
By most accounts, working as a mining engineer today is no more dangerous than most professions. However, that's not to say that the materials mining engineers work with are not dangerous. One of the reasons that mining is so safe is because the mining engineers themselves are the people responsible for keeping it that way.
Kathryn Rogers is a mining engineer. She describes an instance where she was working with explosives.
"While blasting underground, we were having problems with secondary dust during the blasting. There are never people underground when we blast the rock. Mines have a very safe tag system to ensure that men and women are on surface before any blasting occurs.
"When the rock is blasted, only the rock that we want to blast is usually damaged. However, secondary dust explosions occur when the dust around the ore ignites and creates a fireball or a large air blast that can travel down tunnels. They are fairly rare, but can cost a lot of money.
"They are a problem because they can generate a lot of flame and heat and damage the surrounding areas where we do not want to have damage. The cost of these blasts can be as high as half a million dollars because the damaged equipment around the area must be replaced and the ore cannot be taken to the surface until everything around is fixed."
This created quite a dilemma because Rogers and her colleagues didn't know what was causing the blasts and it was obviously not possible to have a human down there to observe the blasting.
What would you do?