Barrick gold

It's been almost two years since Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr, 38, went to work at Barrick Goldstrike's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada, but never made it back home to their families.  They were fatally crushed on August 12, 2010 in a mine shaft by tons of falling aggregate and pipe.  As I wrote last year, management at this mine --- an operation owned by the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of tens of billions of dollars --- had jerry-rigged a reset button with a broom handle and failed to replace missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate…
[Updated 11/14/11 below] Barrick Goldstrike is the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of $51.0 Billion. With that kind of wealth, one has to ask why workers at the company's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada were compelled to use a broom handle to keep a reset button depressed, so tons of aggregate rock would continue to flow down a shaft. That jerry-rigging along with the mine management's failure to correct other defects, such as missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate carrying pipe system, led to the death of Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr,…