Afternoon Snooze Button

Coal in the world today

1. A boy works at a coal depot on April 16, 2011 in Jaintia Hills, India. Some of the labor is forced, and an Indian NGO group, Impulse, estimates that 5,000 privately-owned coal mines in Jaintia Hills employed some 70,000 child miners. The government of Meghalaya refuted this figure, claiming that the mines had only 222 minor workers. Despite the ever present dangers and hardships, children, migrants and locals flock to the mines hoping to strike it rich in India’s wild east. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images) #
2. Railway workers push a wagon loaded with coal back to its track after it derailed at Sabarmati power house in Ahmedabad, India on September 7, 2011. Four people were injured after six wagons of a goods train carrying coal got derailed due to heavy rains. (Amit Dave/Reuters) #
3. A young woman stumbles as she tries to carry a large basket of coal as they illegally scavenge at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari, India, where a community of coal scavengers live and work. The contrast between India old and new is nowhere more vivid than among the villages of coal scavengers in eastern India, sitting on an apocalyptic landscape of smoke and fire from decades-old underground coal fires. While India grows ever more middle-class and awash in creature comforts, these villagers risk their lives scavenging coal illegally for a few dollars a day, and come back to homes that at any moment could be swallowed by a fresh fire-induced crack in the earth. (Kevin Frayer/AP) #
4. Relatives identify bodies of killed miners at the Sizhuang Coal Mine after a gas leak in Shizong county in China’s Yunnan province on November 11, 2011. Hundreds of rescuers took turns descending into the illegally operated coal mine to search for miners trapped by a gas leak in the country’s second deadly mining accident in less than a week. (AP)#
5. A child sifts the usable residue from the ashes of coal used at a brick factory during the cold days of a harsh winter in Surkhroad, Afghanistan on January 30, 2012. (Rahmat Gul/Associated Press)#