Don Blankenship faces sentencing today, which makes this a day that many people have wanted to see for a long, long time. However, even if Blankenship gets the maximum sentence for ignoring safety rules—a year in prison along with a $250,000 fine—it won’t be enough. Not nearly enough.
Six years after 29 miners were killed in a West Virginia coal dust explosion, the man who ran the mining company like a fiefdom -- a coal baron and power broker who earned millions of dollars a year -- will learn on Wednesday whether he goes to prison.
Blankenship didn’t just ignore safety regulations. He actively told his supervisors and workers to break the rules. In a memo to mine superintendents he directly instructed them to stop work on addressing problems with safety and “run coal.”
"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 [ventilation] overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal," he wrote.
The “construction jobs” in this case would be building stoppings and hanging plastic curtains, both of which are used to control ventilation. What caused the explosion that took the lives of 29 miners? Ventilation problems. If there’s such a thing as corporate murder—and there should be—Don Blankenship is guilty. He not only did it, he did it willfully, with full knowledge of the risk. One year and $250,000? Why that’s less money than Blankenship spent taking a Supreme Court justice to Monte Carlo for hookers and gambling (in exchange for a little help with overturning a $50 million jury verdict). Blankenship spent $3 million just getting another justice elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court so he could get the outcome he wanted. And he did.
You want to think that men like Blankenship don’t really exist. First, because you want to think that no one could be this selfish, merciless, abusive, and vile. Second, because you want to think that such a monster wouldn’t be allowed to not simply operate, but flourish, despite flouting the law and squandering the lives of his workers. However, it probably won’t surprise you that Blankenship is a big contributor to Republican candidates, including his fellow worker in the war on safety and the environment, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK).
Update: Blankenship has been sentenced. His judge, herself the daughter of a coal miner, handed down the maximum sentence.
Former coal executive Don Blankenship has been sentenced to one year in prison and fined $250,000 for conspiracy to violate mine safety standards in the deadliest U.S. mine explosion in four decades.
So Blankenship should get to spend a little quality time away from his giant castle on the one mountain he defaced with his own face rather than mountaintop removal mining. He deserves worse, but at least both the jury and the judge saw this man for what he is and did what they could.