The Centralia Mine Explosion

Ifeoma Amakom

MPA 500

9TH SEPT, 15

The Centralia mine explosion gives us a realistic view of how complex bureaucracy is, due to a factor of reasons we will look into briefly.

In trying to understand the complexity of the public sector, viewed as “swap-like” because of its complex environment of multiple, diverse and often conflicting expectations, which renders the jobs of public mangers like Scanlon difficult if not impossible. Perrow concluded that the tightly-coupled complex systems were more accident prone, as seen in the Centralia No 5 coal mine explosion. So why is it so complex?

Many American have wondered why the government cannot be cut to a manageable size, at least this saves the budget of maintaining multiple agencies. The truth is many lobbyists have vested interest in policies enforced by these agencies; this manifestation of pluralism makes it difficult to shrink Americas  bureaucracy .Most of these agencies also have political ties and interest therefore any call for change will be fought by those with interest in the policies of the agencies.

Conservatives claim that the government should be cut, that it’s too intrusive and a smaller government will be more effective .Liberals believe that the government has broad responsibilities and therefore must be robust in order to accomplish its set task.

Woodrow Wilson wrote that the primary aim of government administrative study should be to discern what government can properly and successfully do.

So the question is would the explosion have been avoided if Scanlon had only one agency to report to? In trying to understand the administrative lapses of the people involved in ensuring the safety of the miners, it is important we breakdown the lapses in order to paint a clearly picture and apportion the blame.

In analyzing the case study i could identify three administrative lapses/problems

1. Political   2.  Managerial  3. Legal.

1a. Centralia Coal Company took the business approach and didn’t care about its workers, despite being told repeated times about the hazardous conditions of the mine.

b. Hierarchical issues: The complexity of the administrative process were many players are involved in policy implementation and interpretation which often times leads to error and lapses and finger pointing because they thought it was office A or Bs duty.

-The state of Illinois.

- Illinois department of Mines and Minerals

-The US Bureau of Mines

-The United States Government

-Centralia Coal Company and the United Mine Workers of America.

“There’s scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple, which is not now complex. Government once had but a few masters, it now has scores of master” (Wilson).  

2. Lack of accountability between Political actors. Coal has always been deeply enmeshed in Illinois politics, so the question to ask is, was the refusal to close the mine politically motivated?  bowing to pressure from lobbyist and stakeholder in the Republican Party.