29 miners died in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. The mine had scores of safety violations prior to the accident, but it kept on going anyway. This is the way it is in the modern energy business. They give lip service to the idea of safety while all the while gaming the system, pushing the boundaries, knowing that if there is a disaster and people die, well there will be more to take their jobs. In places like Louisiana or Kentucky and West Virginia, where else are they going to go for a well paying job?
This has been the cynical bargain that the Bush Administration regulatory environment established. As long as not too many people died and the coal and oil kept flowing the Federal Government would turn a blind eye. That seems to be changing under the Obama administration.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
Yesterday the Department of Labor asked a judge to shut down another of Massey Energy’s mines, the Freedom Mine No 1. This is an older mine but it has a huge history of trouble. In the this last year there have been more than 700 safety violations, of which 50 have been what they call "unwarrantable failures" which means that the mine should not be operated at all until they are corrected. That is 50 this calendar year.
The Mine Health and Safety Administration (MSHA) has the power to ask judge to shut down a mine for safety reasons. They have had that power since 1979 but this is the very first time it has ever been used.
Mining coal is a dangerous thing. Coal dust is explosive; methane (which is always present in coal mines) is an explosive gas. The two together in an environment where there are heavy machines and electricity makes for a inherently dangerous situation. However there are things that can be done to mitigate this risk. Removing coal as quickly as possible, keeping things wet to prevent coal dust from rising, spraying non-working coal faces with limestone dust, proper ventilation plans, maintenance of methane detectors and above all adherence to regulations about when it is safe to mine and when you need to leave.
These are the kinds of things that Massey’s President Don Blankenship considers unnecessary. He is on record telling his managers that their job is to move coal, that if an engineer wants to slow things down to build proper ventilation, they should not listen. He actually wrote this in a now infamous memo. To be fair, he did write a CYA memo a few days later saying that safety is the first priority at Massey, probably after his lawyers told him how much liability his first memo exposed him too.
Massey continues to claim that it is committed to safety, but there is no credibility to this. The Freedom No 1 has been cited for literally thousands of violations. It is what is considered a gassy mine, with 1 to 2 million cubic feet of methane released everyday. This makes it particularly dangerous. The Freedom 1 mine has also been cited multiple times for allowing excess coal and coal dust in this highly volatile environment. For one violation alone it too 1260 man-hours to clean up, there was coal and coal dust under a conveyer belt more than two feet deep.
Just since August of this year there have been six major ceiling falls at Freedom No 1. One of them was huge, 250 feet long, 18 feet wide and 9 feet thick. That is 40,500 cubic feet of rock that fell into the mine. That was one fall. Yet Massey has continued to send 130 miners down into these conditions. There can be no reconciling the idea that they are committed to safety and the actions at this mine.
What is really troubling is this is not the only Massey mine which has these problems. The Upper Big Branch and Freedom mines are just part of a systematic attempt by a company to skip safety in the name of increased profits. It is good to see that the Department of Labor and MSHA is getting serious. The ability of mining companies to challenge their citations has been useful in keeping the regulators from shutting them down for repeated violations. While the citation is being appealed, it can’t be counted against the mining company for purposes of establishing a pattern.
Hopefully the judge will shut down the Freedom mine before there is a repeat of the Upper Big Branch. Mining will never be completely safe. It is always going to involve risk but as a nation we should not put up with lawless companies who view their workers as no more than replaceable machines and don’t take the risk to their lives into account, or worse do account for it but choose 1% more profit over worker safety.
The floor is yours.