Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Price

What makes this sentence quietly cutting is how hard it tries not to sound dramatic. “The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire” is almost comically procedural, a disaster described in the dead language of incident reports. Price, a writer who often zeros in on systems more than villains, frames catastrophe as a repeatable mechanism: not a freak accident, not an operatic tragedy, but a known failure mode you can practically diagram.

The key move is the insistence on “not uniquely in coal environments.” That clause reads like testimony offered under pressure, the verbal equivalent of sliding a liability waiver across the table. It’s a dodge and a diagnosis at once. On the surface, it’s a factual clarification: conveyor fires happen across industries. Underneath, it’s a preemptive battle over narrative. If the public associates conveyor-belt fires with coal, the story becomes morally legible fast: dirty industry, predictable neglect, workers paying the price. Price’s phrasing resists that easy symbolism. He redirects attention from one stigmatized sector to the broader industrial logic that produces the same hazards everywhere: speed, throughput, friction, dust, corner-cut maintenance.

The conveyor belt itself is doing thematic work. It’s an object built to keep things moving, to prevent stoppages, and the fire is what happens when that imperative collides with physics and fatigue. In that sense, the line isn’t trying to exonerate coal so much as to implicate industrial modernity: the danger isn’t exceptional, it’s standardized. That’s the bleak punchline - catastrophe as just another product of the line.