Lessons from the underground

The mining disaster in Amasra left a ball of flame in the middle of 41 homes. We as a nation of course felt the first pain, the shock, the grief. From the moment the incident was heard of, we saw everyone's energy and morale drop. For several days now the images of the event have been passing continuously before people's eyes, and every time it is spoken of, it is seen that the nation takes part in a mourning.

Of course, like all such incidents, it is a trouble too great to be the lot of one person, of the direct victims of the event. A pain that perhaps, if not vanishing as it is shared, at least lightens. Fire does indeed burn the place where it falls, but such pains, falling onto the agenda of a whole country, at first briefly suffocate everyone's heart. But let us admit that the way it burns the place where it falls is something else.

In the rapidly flowing agenda, occupation and preoccupation of the world, how much longer will other people go on feeling these pains? If it had not been swept up by these preoccupations and forgotten, could the next one have been prevented through the lessons learned from the previous one?

What happened after Soma, after Ermenek, after Şirvan? In the places where the fire fell, families were scorched by their own pains. Life surely went on for those who remained, but how did it go on, what did the mothers, wives, children, siblings go through in that time, does anyone know?

"I am witnessing a small-scale apocalypse that has broken out in the mine in Şirvan," I had written, after the mining disaster that happened six years ago. During this apocalypse you feel how unimportant what is going on in the rest of the world becomes, how it turns into empty and meaningless things.

While a person is living his own apocalypse, even those closest to him feel this apocalypse very little. There is such an opinion. But it is seen that this opinion has not taken into account at all the apocalypse felt while waiting with the hope, however slight the possibility, of bringing one's loved one out alive from under the earth.

We say precaution, we say occupational safety, we remember again each time. But again each time, dozens of lives paid for precautions not taken begin to be remembered first as a pain and then as a number, and then our carelessness returns again. Yet precaution is the brother of fate.

In fact, probably all the precautions that could be taken have been taken. The regulations have specified and made mandatory, as far as possible, all the precautions in all their details for the activity. But the monitoring of these regulations can still, somewhere before our culture of precautions, give an entirely unexpected human lapse. A small precaution neglected out of the complacency given by the fact that nothing has happened so far, out of the thought that "nothing will happen." At precisely the moment when it is least hoped for, least expected, that thing that was not to happen happens. That you have never had an accident so far does not mean you are immune to accidents. Even if you do not make a mistake, you have to take into account someone else's mistake.

This culture of not caring, this culture of sacrificing the trouble of precaution to the comfort of taking the easy way, keeps coming up before us with the same heedlessness not only in mining but in traffic and in other areas of life.

The investigation into the incident continues, and in fact none of those speaking is yet fully aware of what happened. Mining is in itself a field in which unknowns, and therefore risks, can never be wholly exhausted. Even so, we assume that we have reached a relatively more advanced level of awareness about precautions. We are technically more advanced, and as a country far richer and more developed than before, we cannot accept that these mining accidents take so many lives. Perhaps the outrage shown toward such incidents comes precisely from the incompatibility of these accidents with this claim of development.

Above all calculations there is His calculation, above everything there is a fate of His, of course, but if this belief of ours leads us to even the slightest complacency about taking precautions from here on, it must be known that no one has the right to cast responsibility upon God.

The belief in fate is of course not like this. If it were, it would be impossible to hold anyone responsible for any event, and so there would be no crime and punishment. Yet if there is a wrong, there is someone responsible for it, and where there is no responsibility, there is no justice either.

Meanwhile, the tremendous examples of heroism that emerge after each of the mining accidents tell how a precious nobility develops among people who have formed a community of fate underground.

These examples emerge after almost every mining accident. Each of the miners, who sacrifice themselves for their friends, who try not to be a burden on others, who with great sacrifices carry one another's, even humanity's, burden, what a brave, what a noble heart he carries within.

These examples must have a warning, awakening effect on us too, against so many of our lost virtues, as people die or witness their friends' deaths. With the lessons that throw in our faces the heavy debt, the responsibility and, of course, a little of the guilt that falls to our share from these deaths, from these testimonies.