First satellite imagery of the Feb-13, 2024 landslide at Çöpler Mine in Turkey

I'm not so sure, by hours created and viewed in recent years that may no longer be true with TikTok / Reels / Stories / Shorts.

There's a lot of issues with how mining is done, and how owners are held to account, but kneejerk calls for immediate punishment and/or commenting is entirely not constructive.

3. Producing field get exhausted or becomes uneconomic to operate, company sells field to smaller less-capitalized operator who reworks some wells in an effort to pay back their investment.

4. Smaller operator eventually sells to a mom-and-pop operator who operates a series of stripper wells in the field. Once production from these wells decline to the point where this under-capitalized operator can no longer profit the field is abandoned and tax payers are left to fund the cleanup.

All of this can take decades before abandonment and any technological advance during that time could make the field more attractive to large operators who would then buy these fields from the mom-and-pops and mid-size operators so they could squeeze even more profits before cycling back into the later steps of the loop.

Over a long enough time period you have a Texas which is dotted with tens of thousands of orphaned or abandoned wells. Many of these wells leak oil, natural gas, or brines into shallow surface aquifers when the old production strings inevitably rust away. The problem is worse when new tech maintains production in an area since wells that were abandoned years or decades ago but never plugged are effectively open to atmospheric pressure and when a technique like hydraulic fracturing is used downhole, it repressurizes formations and can force fluids up thru unplugged wellbores to the surface where, if controls are not in place, fluid spills are inevitable.

When that happens in an area that had been abandoned the operator responsible for the increased pressure would argue that cleanup is not their responsibility since the previous owner was responsible (had paid a bond to the state) for the plugging and abandonment of the leaking well.

It's more complicated than this but you get the idea. It's never their problem and the wrong people tend to get stuck with remediation expenses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68287504

If you scroll down the wiki link you can see that the changes to the Mines and Quarries Act ultimately lead to things such as the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (1974) which provided some teeth with which to bite the owners that cut corners, paid off inspectors, etc.

Swings and roundabouts though, a little while later came the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 which was easily one of the most bitter industrial disputes Britain has ever seen.

     a turning point in British history. Miners left their pits to fight the attempt of the Thatcher government to close the collieries, break the miners’ union and the labour movement in general, and open the way to a free market economy in which deregulated financial capitalism would be set free by the Big Bang of 1986. The full force of the police, the courts and the media were mobilised to defeat the miners, culminating with the battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. Thousands of miners were arrested, fined, imprisoned or sacked, some never to work again.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/40-yea...

All part of the delicate balance between those many hordes wanting good wages and working conditions and those few that want all the profits.

Indeed, the disaster was one of the main inputs that led to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the act under which senior officials nowadays can be (and sometimes are) prosecuted for negligence leading to deaths.