The Canary: How a Princeton Kid Became a Coal Miner and Saved Hundreds of Lives

This is part 3 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.

Here’s the thing about bureaucrats: most of us picture someone shuffling papers in a beige office. We don’t picture someone going underground in a West Virginia coal mine to figure out why people keep dying.

Michael Lewis opens this chapter by describing an awards program called the Sammies, run by a nonprofit called the Partnership for Public Service. Every spring they try to recognize extraordinary work by federal employees. The problem is, nobody in government will brag. They just quietly go back to their jobs. One year, buried deep in a list of 525 nominees, Lewis spotted something different. Four words that changed his whole story.

“A former coal miner.”

Those four words were attached to a nomination for a guy named Christopher Mark, who had apparently led the effort to prevent roof falls in underground mines, resulting in the first year ever, in 2016, with zero roof fall fatalities in the US. Lewis called him expecting a dramatic backstory. A dead father. A West Virginia childhood. A personal tragedy that drove him.

Nope. “I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” Chris told him. “My dad was a professor at the university.”

The Princeton Kid Who Ran Away

Christopher Mark’s father was Robert Mark, a civil engineer at Princeton who became famous for using stress-testing models to figure out how Gothic cathedrals stayed standing. His dad was in Life magazine. He appeared in Scientific American. He was kind of a big deal.

Chris was smart, technically gifted, and deeply bothered by something his father wasn’t: elitism. Growing up in Princeton in the 1960s, watching the Vietnam War tear things apart while Ivy League kids stayed safely home, Chris became increasingly anti-establishment. He used words like “bourgeois.” He joined protests. He argued with his dad constantly.

After high school, he told his father he wanted to work in a factory instead of going to college. His dad said he wasn’t paying for that. So Chris said, fine, I won’t go to college at all.

He joined a group of young idealists who wanted to organize workers. He bounced from an oil refinery in LA to a UPS warehouse to an auto plant in Detroit, and finally ended up at a coal mine in West Virginia. The two other idealists who came with him took one look at the coal mine and immediately left. Chris stayed.

There’s a detail Lewis mentions almost in passing, something he only learned from a former colleague of Robert Mark’s: while Chris was at the West Virginia mine, he got a call from home. His mother had died by suicide. He went back for two days. Then he returned to the mine.

He was 19 years old.

Underground, Something Changed

You’d think a Princeton kid in a West Virginia coal mine would stick out like a sore thumb. And he did. He never pretended otherwise. “I was never unaware of my outsider status for a moment,” he said.

But here’s the thing: the real workers weren’t who he expected. He’d imagined them as people waiting to be awakened to their exploitation. They were just people trying to make a living. Coal was booming in the late 1970s. Miners felt good about their work.

Chris also found, to his own surprise, that he loved being underground. “It was just so cool,” he said. “You go down into a place most people think you are crazy to be. And you like it.”

His political fire slowly burned out. His interest in workers shifted from ideology to something practical: he wanted to keep them from dying.

He enrolled at Penn State to study mining engineering. He kept working in coal mines to pay for it.

The Problem No One Was Really Solving

In one class, a professor named Bieniawski lectured on the formulas used to design the pillars holding up mine roofs. A student raised his hand. “Which formula is the right one?” The professor, who had literally invented one of the formulas, said: “Use your engineering judgment.”

That answer lit a fire in Chris. Each formula gave a different answer. At most one could be correct. When you got it wrong, miners died. And nobody had figured out which formula actually worked.

He’d found his thing.

In 1984, a mine roof collapsed at the Wilberg Mine in Utah. Twenty-seven people were killed, including nine company executives who had come to watch a world record being set for most coal mined in a single day. Their bodies took a year to recover.

Chris thought: if they’d had the right pillar formula, those people would still be alive.

He started his PhD on exactly that.

Building the Science From Scratch

So here’s what happened when Chris got to work at the Bureau of Mines in 1987. He made up his own job title, “Principal Roof Control Specialist,” because nobody had told him what to do. They put him in a basement office next to a guy who made donkey sounds whenever the phone rang. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

The bureau had tons of data on mine failures, but nobody was really analyzing it. Chris started digging through it the way a good statistician would. He wasn’t trying to find a perfect mathematical formula. He was trying to improve the odds.

His insight was this: coal mine roof safety was less like calculating the stress on a bridge and more like predicting baseball players. You’re never going to be right every time. You just try to improve your batting average.

He created what he called a “stability factor,” a number that told you how safe a mine roof was based on measurable conditions. Then he spent years actually traveling to coal fields across the US, personally explaining his software to mining engineers. He wrote the code. He gave it away for free. Congress never mandated it. Nobody had to use it.

They just used it because it worked.

But that was only half the problem.

The Roof Bolts Betrayal

Here’s a story that should make you angry.

After World War II, the coal industry adopted a new technology: roof bolts. Instead of timber supports, you drill metal bolts directly into the rock above you, pinning the layers together the way a toothpick holds a club sandwich. It was genuinely brilliant. The most important safety innovation in mining history.

And for 20 years, it made basically no difference to death and injury rates.

Chris dug into the historical data and found out why. The companies had figured out the minimum number of bolts they needed to install to keep risk at the same level it had always been. They used the new technology to mine more coal cheaply, not to make it safer. They kept the probabilities of death and injury exactly where they’d always been.

“They knew what they were doing,” Chris said. “They could see people dying. Even in a union mine they did it. These were not dumb guys. This was a conscious decision.”

Fatality rates only started dropping significantly in 1969, and it wasn’t because the industry finally learned to use bolts correctly. It was because Congress finally gave mine inspectors real enforcement power.

The lesson isn’t subtle: left on its own, the free market will not protect workers when it’s expensive to do so.

Zero

After Crandall Canyon in 2007, where six miners were trapped and killed 2,000 feet underground because a company had ignored Chris’s pillar formula, the rules changed. All mines deeper than 1,000 feet would now have to get their designs reviewed by Chris’s office.

Nine years later, in 2016, for the first time in recorded history, zero underground coal miners in the US were killed by a falling roof.

Chris wrote a paper about it called “The Road to Zero.” His conclusion was that roughly half the saved lives came from better technology and research. The other half came from government regulators actually having the power to enforce safety rules.

Both things mattered. Neither alone would have been enough.

Like Father, Like Son (Neither Would Say It)

There’s a quiet irony running through this whole story. Chris fled his father’s world and his father’s career. But what did he end up doing? Spending his professional life measuring the stress in stone, understanding what causes roofs to collapse, using scientific methods to answer questions everyone else thought were unanswerable.

His father studied Gothic cathedrals. Chris studied coal mines.

“His father never acknowledged that their work had anything in common,” said Chris’s wife Mary, who is a psychologist.

But there’s one place their work literally converged. In 2002, his father was hired to figure out what was happening to Washington National Cathedral, which had been sinking and tilting for decades. Chris told his dad he had instruments from coal mine work that could measure underground movement. They ended up working together for four years, the only paper they’d ever write together.

The cathedral wasn’t in danger. The problem was slowing down.

Chris found that satisfying. He always just wanted to find fixable problems. Roofs fall. Someone needs to help them stay up.

And that’s why it matters. Not because it makes a great movie, but because it’s real. A kid from Princeton who became a coal miner, who became a government scientist nobody had heard of, spent 30 years solving a problem that killed 50,000 people over the course of the 20th century. He solved it with software he gave away for free, data nobody else was analyzing, and a job inside the federal government that gave him the freedom, as he put it, to do things no one told him to do and no one could have told him to do.

That’s the thing about government work. Sometimes the most important person in a room is someone who made up their own job title and worked quietly in a basement for decades.

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Book: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis | ISBN: 9798217047802