29 dead in blast at Upper Big Branch

By Will Parry

As the world now knows, twenty-nine coal miners died April 5 in an explosion in the Upper Big Branch mine, a West Virginia property of Massey Energy. It was the deadliest mining disaster in forty years.

It must have been a shattering explosion. Veteran rescue workers with decades of experience were shaken by the chaos they found a thousand feet down. They said they had never seen destruction on that scale. The blast “turned rail lines into pretzels,” one said.

Massey CEO Don Blankenship tried to shuck off accountability. “Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” he said. “There are violations at every coal mine in America.”

True enough. But since 2005, in its 35 underground and 12 mountaintop removal mines, Massey has been cited by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration 38,997 times for violations of safe mining procedures.

The truth that Blankenship evaded was clearly expressed by Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

“All explosions are preventable,” Stricklin said. “It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.”

As recently as March of this year, safety officials found 57 infractions at Upper Big Branch including the repeated failure to develop and follow a ventilation plan. Other violations concerned the accumulation of methane gas. The presence of methane led to “several” evacuations in recent months. In combination with the failure to ventilate adequately, methane is an open invitation to explosions.

J. Davitt McAteer, who headed the mine safety agency during the Clinton Administration, said that his preliminary information suggested the explosion of a combination of methane and coal dust. “Think about this,” McAteer said, “We haven’t had a major dust explosion in the country since 1968. That tells you there’s a very fundamental problem here.”

Upper Big Branch, like all Massey properties, is non-union. Blankenship went after the union in the 1980s, with the connivance of the Reagan Administration. Workers at the Massy mines make good wages, but have fewer benefits than workers at union properties. More to the point, where a miner in a union mine could challenge a safety infraction without being fired, fear silences those who work for Massey.

Massey keeps on mining coal despite the flood of fines and citations by the simple device of contesting most of them. Federal officials say Massey contests more safety fines than any other coal mining company in the nation. By contesting the citations, Massey has been able to avoid falling into a “potential pattern of violation” category, a step that would have moved federal regulators closer to being able to shut down operations.

The backlog of contested violations has grown since the 2006 Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act boosted the number of inspectors, stiffened fines and toughened safety regulations. The resulting increase in contested citations has overloaded the federal review commission, which has a backlog of more than 16,600 contested cases.

“The hope and expectation was that operators would comply, rather than leave themselves vulnerable to the increased penalties. Instead, a lot of operators have opted to contest every citation, leading to the backlog at the commission,” said Judy Rivlin, associate general counsel of the United Mine Workers of America.

The backlog is not mere piled-up paperwork. Workers’ lives are at stake when violations continue uncorrected.

Like the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), the Mine Safety and Health Administration has been understaffed, underfinanced and lacking in enforcement power.

“The backlog is an enormous problem,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), chairman of the Education and Labor subcommittee on work force protections. “We need more resources for administrative law judges and solicitors at the Department of Labor to eliminate this problem as soon as possible.”

Blankenship, the CE sometimes arrives at his mining properties in a black helicopter, other times in a black Mercedes. Like many anti-union employers, he seeks to convey the image of a protective father. Last year he hosted a Fourth of July celebration with Ted Nugent as the headliner. After the explosion, he announced he is paying for the dead miners’ funerals. And he refers to his employees as “members,” much as Wal-Mart refers to its employees as “associates.”

Blankenship’s patina of graciousness may be wearing thin. The day after the explosion, he arrived at Upper Big Branch to announce the death toll to families gathered at the site. As he prepared to speak, anguished family members screamed at him for caring more about profits than about miners’ lives.

The home page on Massey Energy’s website declares: “We strive for sustainable excellence in safety. It is our top priority every day.”

But in an irate memo to his deep mine superintendents, Blankenship made it clear his one and only priority is not safety, but to “run coal” at any cost:

“If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

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