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2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely - NYTimes.com
2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely - NYTimes.com
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April 22, 2010
2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely
By DAN BARRY, IAN URBINA and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
This article is by Dan Barry, Ian Urbina and Clifford Krauss.
Earlier this year, in the subterranean workplace of a southern West Virginia coal mine, methane kept building up because of a lack of fresh air. Odorless, explosive, this natural gas must be dispersed from where miners work, and yet it became such a familiar presence at the mine called Upper Big Branch that entire sections had to be evacuated four times this year alone.
Many of the miners suspected they knew a major source of the gas buildup: a coal shaft, unused for years, that passed down through several old mines before reaching theirs. According to a longtime foreman at the mine, who provided previously undisclosed details of its operation, the shaft was never properly sealed to prevent the methane above from being sucked into Upper Big Branch.
Instead, the foreman said, rags and garbage were used to create a poor man’s sealant, which he said allowed methane to permeate the mine, displacing much-needed oxygen.
“Every single day, the levels were double or triple what they were supposed to be,” said the foreman, whose account of the shaft was corroborated in part by records collected by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. The foreman, who is now working with federal prosecutors and elected officials investigating the mine, asked not to be identified because speaking out is not acceptable in the culture of his company, Massey Energy. Excerpts from an audio recording of the foreman’s remarks are at nytimes.com.
It is not clear whether the coal shaft played a role in the explosion of the Upper Big Branch mine two weeks ago, a disaster that killed 29 miners, rattled West Virginia and, once again, raised questions about Massey’s safety practices. But with federal investigators saying they suspect that a buildup of methane and coal dust led to the explosion, the handling of the shaft seems a particularly egregious example of the mining practices that have set Massey apart from the rest of the coal industry.
Coal mining carries inherent risks. But the numerous and very public violations and fatalities at Massey-owned mines over the years may leave the impression that all mines are run this way — that all mines leave coal shafts open and fail to exhaust methane properly. They do not. A comparison between Massey’s safety practices and those of other operators in the coal industry shows sharp differences, helping to explain why Massey mines led the list of those warned by federal regulators that they could face greater scrutiny because of their many violations.
For example, less than 200 miles to the west, in a corner of Kentucky called Hazard, a unit of the TECO Coal Corporation operates a mine with the all-business name of E3-1. Like Upper Big Branch, it is nonunion. It has fewer employees, produces three-quarters the amount of bituminous coal, uses an arguably riskier method of mining — and, its operators say, emits 25 percent more methane a day.
Yet E3-1 has not had an underground fatality since it opened in July 2004; nor does it have anywhere near the number of violations accumulated by Upper Big Branch.
TECO is not immune to violations and accidental deaths; for example, an inadequately supported roof collapsed in 2006, killing a worker in a TECO-owned mine across the road from E3-1. But the operators at E3-1 say they build on experience, and strive toward vigilant safety practices, including routinely trying to double the required amount of fresh air that is directed into the mine’s chambers.
“This mine is gassy; it liberates methane,” said Robert J. Zik, the company’s vice president for operations. “So if we don’t do it right, you’re going to have a problem.”
“The mine has to be ventilated,” Mr. Zik added. “Otherwise, it will destroy the company. I don’t think TECO Coal could have an accident like Massey’s and survive.”
TECO executives and miners, who spoke openly and on the record during a reporter’s tour of the E3-1 mine last week, say that their training, procedures and equipment generally exceed what is required by Kentucky and federal regulators. The company says it rewards safety, provides an 800 number for anonymous complaints and fosters an open-door management style.
The differences in safety practices between TECO and Massey are often stark. Where TECO workers rigorously inspect the mine for safety problems before every shift, Upper Big Branch has had dozens of violations related to pre-shift examinations, some for failing to conduct them at all, others for not documenting that they had been done. All TECO miners get weeks of safety training, but in September an inspector ordered dozens of Massey miners out of Upper Big Branch because they lacked proper training.
Several years ago, TECO fired a mine foreman for failing to rehang a ventilation curtain that had fallen to the mine floor and contributed to a fire. At Upper Big Branch, inspectors more than once found curtains improperly hung or lying on the mine floor, a practice workers said was routine and encouraged because the plastic sheets get in the way of equipment.
And the attention to safety — or the lack of it — has had measurable results: Compared with the industry average, TECO’s workers spent much less time away from work because of injury last year; Upper Big Branch workers spent significantly more.
TECO’s mine has had far fewer safety violations over the last five years than Massey’s, and the company has been less inclined than Massey to fight with regulators. Massey has contested 69 percent of the proposed $1.9 million in civil penalties proposed by the mine safety agency since the beginning of 2005, federal records show.
Massey executives, especially its chairman and chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, have also said they maintain a vigilant commitment to safety, though they declined to comment in detail for this article.
“Massey’s board of directors has instructed counsel and mine experts to conduct a full evaluation of events, and it would be premature to comment on specific violations before they have had time to finish,” said a statement issued Thursday by a company spokeswoman, Karen Hanretty. “It’s important to note, however, that all M.S.H.A. violations must be abated. Most citations are corrected the same day, often immediately. For those that require more time, a deadline is given by M.S.H.A. to correct the situation.”
Nonetheless, the 52 deaths over the past 10 years at their mines — including a fatal 2006 fire in a mine with safety practices so poor they were later deemed criminal — tend to undermine the Massey assertions.
Now, in the wake of a catastrophe that has all of West Virginia in mourning, the trail of federal violations issued to Upper Big Branch, many of them in the weeks leading up to the explosion, seems infused with foreboding.
“The methane and dust control plan is not being followed.”
“The lifeline in the primary escape way” is not being maintained.
“In case of an emergency the men on this section would not have fresh air in the primary escapeway.”
“Management engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence, in that production was deemed more important than conducting parameter checks.”
Grown Men, Crying
Like so many other workers across the country, the day-shift miners at Upper Big Branch had an early-morning commute. Every workday, a dozen or so piled into a covered vehicle called a mantrip and caught a half-hour doze as the car followed a track three to four miles into the side of a central Appalachian mountain.
The car would come to a stop in a world where the ceiling was less than seven feet high, the floor puddled with water, and the air cool, breezy and faintly musty. As loud fans helped to move the air, the mining machine would grind back and forth about 1,000 feet across the wall, slicing coal to be carried away by conveyor belt.
Down there, fresh air could not be taken for granted.
Well before this month’s fatal explosion at Upper Big Branch, the country’s worst mine disaster in 40 years, the lack of proper ventilation had been a continuing concern among its miners. The fear of methane building while oxygen dropped preyed on their minds.
“I have had guys come to me and cry,” said the veteran foreman. “Grown men cried — because they are scared.”
But workers in the mine said they did not dare question the company’s safety practices, even when asked to perform a dubious task.
“It was all about production,” said Andrew Tyler, 22, an electrician who two years ago worked as a subcontractor on the wiring for the coal conveyer belt and other equipment at Upper Big Branch. “If you worked for them, you didn’t ask questions about whether some step like running a cable around the breaker was a smart idea. You just did it.”
The foreman said that everyone agreed that an obvious culprit for some of the compromised air was what they called the “glory hole,” an old mining term for the chimneylike storage shaft deep within the mountain, a few hundred feet long and about 20 feet wide, that connected Upper Big Branch to a few mines above.
In years past, coal from these upper mines was dumped down the shaft to Upper Big Branch, then taken out by conveyor belt. But after the shaft stopped being used, the foreman said, a proper seal between floors was never installed.
“They just dumped trash in there,” he said. “Any kind of trash they could get, buckets, you name it.”
The foreman said that methane was being sucked down through the shaft into the active mine, to the point that methane readings in the area often measured at twice the allowable level.
About two months ago, he said, a young, fit contractor climbed a ladder on the outside of the coal shaft to retrieve a monitor. A few steps up, though, the man passed out — apparently from the high methane levels — and had to be dragged to safety. The incident was kept quiet, the foreman said, and never reported to state and federal regulators.
At least 44 times in the last two years, regulators cited the mine for major methane violations. Just three months ago, an inspector found that ventilation air was flowing the wrong way, thwarting any potential escape in an emergency. The inspector wrote that Terry Moore, the supervisor in charge, had been aware of the condition for three weeks.
“Mr. Moore engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence in that he was aware of the condition,” the inspector said.
The foreman said that miners had fresh-air concerns beyond those created by the leaky, unused shaft. There were also the air-lock steel doors that swung open, saloon-style, dozens of times a day, as miners in mantrips crossed over the primary tunnel providing fresh air. Every time the doors opened, he said, they compromised the flow of clean air that helps to flush out the methane.
Ideally, the doors should not be in the way of the air flow. The foreman said that worried miners had pressed the coal company to cut through rock to create a dedicated air pathway, but were met with a dismissive rejection, along the lines of: We dig coal, not rock.
Inspectors have cited the company at least a dozen times over the past two years for failing to maintain or properly operate doors intended to direct air flow inside the mine. In November, an inspector found two large holes in the set of doors cited by the foreman, and noted that a large amount of air was escaping.
According to two other miners who had worked for several years at Upper Big Branch and asked not to be identified in order to keep their jobs, the pressure to run coal was so intense at times that any claim of a commitment to safety seemed like part of some absurdist play. Entrance guards would alert the miners when an inspector was on the way down. Equipment that measured coal dust was manipulated by placing it in areas with cleaner air before inspectors checked it. Curtains that directed clean air were moved around to favorably skew readings.
Daniel Woods, a federal mining inspector from Man, W.Va., on disability leave, said that Massey mines were some of the most difficult to handle. Inspections that should have taken a day took three, he said, because the first day would be spent arguing with Massey operators over paperwork and permission to enter certain sections. The company was far more likely than others to complain about inspectors it thought were too aggressive, and eventually the mine safety agency would send different inspectors, he said.
And then there were the lifelines: the steel cables that hang from the ceiling and run the length of the tunnels, intended to guide miners in darkness and smoke out of dangerous situations and into safety.
The company knew the importance of lifelines because it had been cited more than two dozen times since January 2009 for not properly maintaining them. Last summer, for example, an inspector ordered workers out of the mine after discovering several hazards, including an incorrect escape route map, a part of that route underwater — and a long stretch of lifeline missing.
According to the foreman, a few months ago the company built a wall to try and address some of the mine’s ventilation problems. That wall was still in place at the time of the explosion.
The only problem, he said: The new wall cut off a lifeline.
A Criminal Fire
Four years ago, in another southern West Virginia coal mine owned by a Massey subsidiary, a preventable fire broke out two miles below the surface. A faulty conveyor belt that should have been better maintained ignited some coal spillage that should not have been allowed to accumulate, federal investigators found in a report compiled after the incident.
One of the miners hurriedly tried to connect a fire hose to a nearby water valve, but this was futile; the threads of the coupling and the outlet were not compatible. The miner then tried to open the valve — just to get water on the fire — but the line was dry. And things only got worse.
The miner belonged to a crew working in Massey’s Aracoma Alma mine. In a memorandum issued three months before this fire and widely disseminated in 2006, Mr. Blankenship, the company’s chief executive, ordered subordinates to run coal and ignore everything else. A week later he sent a follow-up memo saying that, of course, safety comes first — and that he would “question the membership” of any employee who thought he meant anything other than that.
Now, on the evening of Jan. 19, 2006, just hours after Aracoma officials received yet another handwritten note from Mr. Blankenship — “Stay on coal,” it said in part — a fire had broken out, again, on a misaligned conveyor belt, there was no water, and smoke was thickening.
“You could hear stuff falling and cracking and popping,” a miner named Jonah Rose later said, according to a state report by J. Davitt McAteer, a prominent mine-safety consultant who is now leading a state investigation into the Upper Big Branch explosion. “It sounded like thunder coming through there.”
After a delay of nearly half an hour, the crew of a dozen miners was ordered to evacuate. They rode a mantrip down the primary escape path — only to run into thick, impassable smoke. Holes in a ventilation wall had been created weeks earlier to accommodate electrical equipment, it turned out, effectively compromising the escape tunnel’s fresh air.
The men stumbled out of the vehicle, hollering to stick together, fumbling to don their portable breathing devices, at least one of them vomiting before his air supply halted the sensation of suffocating. Then, as best as they could in the blinding pitch of smoke, the miners felt their way along the coal wall, trying and not always succeeding to form a human chain of life support.
Somebody yelled a muffled something about a door, and the miners followed the voice. On the other side of the door, they could breathe, and see, and count: 10 now, instead of 12. Two roof-bolt operators, Ellery Hatfield and Don Israel Bragg, were missing.
Three miners went back into the smoke, repeatedly removing their masks to shout for the men they called Elvis and Riz. “You could hear them hollering at the top of their lungs, hollering for them,” another miner recalled. But there was no answer.
Two days later, rescuers — whose many obstacles included the inaccurate mine maps provided by the company — found the bodies. Mr. Bragg was 33; Mr. Hatfield was 46.
As in the past, as in the future, state and federal inspection reports provided disturbing context. The Aracoma mine had received more than two-dozen violations in the months just before the fire, including several that cited problems with its ventilation system and three that raised alarms about the build-up of combustible coal dust and spillage.
In addition, Aracoma miners later told investigators that they had put out two other fires caused by faulty conveyor belts in the two weeks before the fatal fire. Neither of these fires was reported to state or federal officials.
In the fall of 2008, the widows of Mr. Bragg and Mr. Hatfield settled their lawsuit against various Massey entities and Mr. Blankenship in midtrial, for an undisclosed amount.
Then, in April 2009, the Aracoma Coal Company, a Massey subsidiary, pleaded guilty to several counts of willfully violating mandatory safety standards, and agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal fines and civil penalties. The Department of Justice described it as the largest financial settlement in the coal industry’s history.
After the fire, court files indicate, Aracoma installed state-of-the-art fire suppression systems, provided training and technologies for emergency mine evacuation, and adopted other safety measures that in hindsight seem obvious.
But ventilation problems similar to those found at Aracoma were also part of a citation issued on Jan. 7 of this year to Upper Big Branch.
“What we’re afraid of is that the same types of ugly conditions at Aracoma may resurface again at Upper Big Branch,” said Bruce Stanley, the lawyer for the two Aracoma widows. “And that perhaps the lessons of Aracoma might not have been learned.”
A Different Kind of Mine
A morning shift of miners disappeared last week into an Appalachian foothill. Wearing blue jumpsuits with orange reflective tape and hardhats with lights, they crouched into small cable cars and descended some 750 feet into the E3-1 mine, the subterranean maze in Hazard that is their place of work.
They breathed air that was cool, fresh and breezy, thanks to a fan system stronger than federal regulations require. They carried portable emergency-breathing devices with which they had all trained four times a year under smoky conditions, well beyond the federal requirement of once a year. (The Massey foreman said such training does not happen that often.)
Theirs is a room-and-pillar mine, in which natural pillars are left during the coal removal to support the roof, some of which are later removed. According to company officials, most mines that use this method create 40-square-foot pillars every 90 feet, while the pillars here measure 70 square feet. (Some mining experts consider this method riskier than the longwall mining approach at Upper Big Branch.)
Typical of the safety measures in evidence are the identification tags on the power breakers. They include explanatory pictures, and not just names or numbers, to reduce the risk of one of the many power lines being plugged into the wrong receptacle, which could lead to electrocution. Massey has no such system, according to the foreman.
In particular, TECO says it emphasizes that the mine be examined before every shift — a federal requirement that has drawn several Massey violations and one that Mr. McAteer, the mine-safety consultant, has repeatedly said is of the utmost importance.
Between the three shifts, foremen at E3-1 test methane levels, check the heavy plastic curtains that help to control air flow, and inspect for cracks in the roof.
“It’s common sense, not high tech,” said Dave Blankenship, TECO’s director of safety and environmental affairs. (He is not related to Massey’s chairman.)
These safety practices did not develop in a vacuum. Five years ago, about a year after the mine opened, one of the heavy plastic curtains that help to control air flow fell down, and a foreman failed to hang it back up. Methane collected, ignited, and created a brief flash fire that caused no injuries but earned two significant violations from federal inspectors.
The foreman was fired, and a machine operator was suspended for three days. “It sent a signal,” Mr. Blankenship said.
The company’s safety record is very good, but not perfect. Five months ago, above ground, an independent contractor was killed and another was seriously injured when a boom fell on them while they worked on building an air shaft for E3-1. Federal inspectors ruled that Perry Coal Company, the TECO subsidiary, had not secured the boom in place; the company is contesting the citation.
The company is also contesting a $70,000 fine for another incident from last year, in which a worker injured his sacrum, or tailbone, while working on machinery that inspectors also say was not properly secured.
Over all, though, the operation at E3-1 rates well. It has no fatalities, no evacuations for ventilation problems since 2004, and, for the last five years, an injury rate well below the national average in mines.
The shift ended. Miners climbed into the cable cars that would safely take them back up to late-afternoon daylight, where the dogwood and Eastern red bud trees colored the landscape, and where the mining supervisor gave them license to talk to a visiting reporter, on or off the record.
All 10 miners approached by the reporter agreed to talk. All 10 agreed that the supervisors of the E3-1 mine emphasized safety and encouraged cooperation with the state and federal inspectors who are frequently on site.
Gary Caudill, 56 years old and with 30 years in the mines, said that E3-1 was the gassiest mine he had ever been in. But, he said: “I’ve worked for a lot of mines, and this is the safest. If they come in and a curtain is not up, the man responsible would be fired.”
Before calling it a day, 35 of these miners gathered in a paneled room of wooden benches and metal lockers for their weekly safety meeting, where the words “Safety on Call” loom above the door. Some sat, most stood, and all listened in silence as their mine safety inspector, Rocky Moore, began the session by bringing up the Upper Big Branch disaster.
Mr. Moore repeated what the men already knew, that 29 men had lost their lives in an explosion whose cause remained under investigation. Still, he said, the men before him must remain alert about methane.
He emphasized the importance of the plastic curtains that help to direct air flow. He read aloud a series of best practices for preventing underground explosions: clean up loose coal; check seals; maintain sufficient ventilation; and, again, test frequently for methane.
He asked if anyone had any questions. There were none.
“Just be sure you all be careful,” Mr. Moore said in closing. “And see Mama when you get off work.”
His words carried these weary miners out into the fresh afternoon, where the white and purple-pink blooms of spring adorned the hillside.
Andrew W. Lehren, Janet Roberts, Michael Cooper and Dan Heyman contributed reporting.
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April 22, 2010
2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely
By DAN BARRY, IAN URBINA and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
This article is by Dan Barry, Ian Urbina and Clifford Krauss.
Earlier this year, in the subterranean workplace of a southern West Virginia coal mine, methane kept building up because of a lack of fresh air. Odorless, explosive, this natural gas must be dispersed from where miners work, and yet it became such a familiar presence at the mine called Upper Big Branch that entire sections had to be evacuated four times this year alone.
Many of the miners suspected they knew a major source of the gas buildup: a coal shaft, unused for years, that passed down through several old mines before reaching theirs. According to a longtime foreman at the mine, who provided previously undisclosed details of its operation, the shaft was never properly sealed to prevent the methane above from being sucked into Upper Big Branch.
Instead, the foreman said, rags and garbage were used to create a poor man’s sealant, which he said allowed methane to permeate the mine, displacing much-needed oxygen.
“Every single day, the levels were double or triple what they were supposed to be,” said the foreman, whose account of the shaft was corroborated in part by records collected by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. The foreman, who is now working with federal prosecutors and elected officials investigating the mine, asked not to be identified because speaking out is not acceptable in the culture of his company, Massey Energy. Excerpts from an audio recording of the foreman’s remarks are at nytimes.com.
It is not clear whether the coal shaft played a role in the explosion of the Upper Big Branch mine two weeks ago, a disaster that killed 29 miners, rattled West Virginia and, once again, raised questions about Massey’s safety practices. But with federal investigators saying they suspect that a buildup of methane and coal dust led to the explosion, the handling of the shaft seems a particularly egregious example of the mining practices that have set Massey apart from the rest of the coal industry.
Coal mining carries inherent risks. But the numerous and very public violations and fatalities at Massey-owned mines over the years may leave the impression that all mines are run this way — that all mines leave coal shafts open and fail to exhaust methane properly. They do not. A comparison between Massey’s safety practices and those of other operators in the coal industry shows sharp differences, helping to explain why Massey mines led the list of those warned by federal regulators that they could face greater scrutiny because of their many violations.
For example, less than 200 miles to the west, in a corner of Kentucky called Hazard, a unit of the TECO Coal Corporation operates a mine with the all-business name of E3-1. Like Upper Big Branch, it is nonunion. It has fewer employees, produces three-quarters the amount of bituminous coal, uses an arguably riskier method of mining — and, its operators say, emits 25 percent more methane a day.
Yet E3-1 has not had an underground fatality since it opened in July 2004; nor does it have anywhere near the number of violations accumulated by Upper Big Branch.
TECO is not immune to violations and accidental deaths; for example, an inadequately supported roof collapsed in 2006, killing a worker in a TECO-owned mine across the road from E3-1. But the operators at E3-1 say they build on experience, and strive toward vigilant safety practices, including routinely trying to double the required amount of fresh air that is directed into the mine’s chambers.
“This mine is gassy; it liberates methane,” said Robert J. Zik, the company’s vice president for operations. “So if we don’t do it right, you’re going to have a problem.”
“The mine has to be ventilated,” Mr. Zik added. “Otherwise, it will destroy the company. I don’t think TECO Coal could have an accident like Massey’s and survive.”
TECO executives and miners, who spoke openly and on the record during a reporter’s tour of the E3-1 mine last week, say that their training, procedures and equipment generally exceed what is required by Kentucky and federal regulators. The company says it rewards safety, provides an 800 number for anonymous complaints and fosters an open-door management style.
The differences in safety practices between TECO and Massey are often stark. Where TECO workers rigorously inspect the mine for safety problems before every shift, Upper Big Branch has had dozens of violations related to pre-shift examinations, some for failing to conduct them at all, others for not documenting that they had been done. All TECO miners get weeks of safety training, but in September an inspector ordered dozens of Massey miners out of Upper Big Branch because they lacked proper training.
Several years ago, TECO fired a mine foreman for failing to rehang a ventilation curtain that had fallen to the mine floor and contributed to a fire. At Upper Big Branch, inspectors more than once found curtains improperly hung or lying on the mine floor, a practice workers said was routine and encouraged because the plastic sheets get in the way of equipment.
And the attention to safety — or the lack of it — has had measurable results: Compared with the industry average, TECO’s workers spent much less time away from work because of injury last year; Upper Big Branch workers spent significantly more.
TECO’s mine has had far fewer safety violations over the last five years than Massey’s, and the company has been less inclined than Massey to fight with regulators. Massey has contested 69 percent of the proposed $1.9 million in civil penalties proposed by the mine safety agency since the beginning of 2005, federal records show.
Massey executives, especially its chairman and chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, have also said they maintain a vigilant commitment to safety, though they declined to comment in detail for this article.
“Massey’s board of directors has instructed counsel and mine experts to conduct a full evaluation of events, and it would be premature to comment on specific violations before they have had time to finish,” said a statement issued Thursday by a company spokeswoman, Karen Hanretty. “It’s important to note, however, that all M.S.H.A. violations must be abated. Most citations are corrected the same day, often immediately. For those that require more time, a deadline is given by M.S.H.A. to correct the situation.”
Nonetheless, the 52 deaths over the past 10 years at their mines — including a fatal 2006 fire in a mine with safety practices so poor they were later deemed criminal — tend to undermine the Massey assertions.
Now, in the wake of a catastrophe that has all of West Virginia in mourning, the trail of federal violations issued to Upper Big Branch, many of them in the weeks leading up to the explosion, seems infused with foreboding.
“The methane and dust control plan is not being followed.”
“The lifeline in the primary escape way” is not being maintained.
“In case of an emergency the men on this section would not have fresh air in the primary escapeway.”
“Management engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence, in that production was deemed more important than conducting parameter checks.”
Grown Men, Crying
Like so many other workers across the country, the day-shift miners at Upper Big Branch had an early-morning commute. Every workday, a dozen or so piled into a covered vehicle called a mantrip and caught a half-hour doze as the car followed a track three to four miles into the side of a central Appalachian mountain.
The car would come to a stop in a world where the ceiling was less than seven feet high, the floor puddled with water, and the air cool, breezy and faintly musty. As loud fans helped to move the air, the mining machine would grind back and forth about 1,000 feet across the wall, slicing coal to be carried away by conveyor belt.
Down there, fresh air could not be taken for granted.
Well before this month’s fatal explosion at Upper Big Branch, the country’s worst mine disaster in 40 years, the lack of proper ventilation had been a continuing concern among its miners. The fear of methane building while oxygen dropped preyed on their minds.
“I have had guys come to me and cry,” said the veteran foreman. “Grown men cried — because they are scared.”
But workers in the mine said they did not dare question the company’s safety practices, even when asked to perform a dubious task.
“It was all about production,” said Andrew Tyler, 22, an electrician who two years ago worked as a subcontractor on the wiring for the coal conveyer belt and other equipment at Upper Big Branch. “If you worked for them, you didn’t ask questions about whether some step like running a cable around the breaker was a smart idea. You just did it.”
The foreman said that everyone agreed that an obvious culprit for some of the compromised air was what they called the “glory hole,” an old mining term for the chimneylike storage shaft deep within the mountain, a few hundred feet long and about 20 feet wide, that connected Upper Big Branch to a few mines above.
In years past, coal from these upper mines was dumped down the shaft to Upper Big Branch, then taken out by conveyor belt. But after the shaft stopped being used, the foreman said, a proper seal between floors was never installed.
“They just dumped trash in there,” he said. “Any kind of trash they could get, buckets, you name it.”
The foreman said that methane was being sucked down through the shaft into the active mine, to the point that methane readings in the area often measured at twice the allowable level.
About two months ago, he said, a young, fit contractor climbed a ladder on the outside of the coal shaft to retrieve a monitor. A few steps up, though, the man passed out — apparently from the high methane levels — and had to be dragged to safety. The incident was kept quiet, the foreman said, and never reported to state and federal regulators.
At least 44 times in the last two years, regulators cited the mine for major methane violations. Just three months ago, an inspector found that ventilation air was flowing the wrong way, thwarting any potential escape in an emergency. The inspector wrote that Terry Moore, the supervisor in charge, had been aware of the condition for three weeks.
“Mr. Moore engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence in that he was aware of the condition,” the inspector said.
The foreman said that miners had fresh-air concerns beyond those created by the leaky, unused shaft. There were also the air-lock steel doors that swung open, saloon-style, dozens of times a day, as miners in mantrips crossed over the primary tunnel providing fresh air. Every time the doors opened, he said, they compromised the flow of clean air that helps to flush out the methane.
Ideally, the doors should not be in the way of the air flow. The foreman said that worried miners had pressed the coal company to cut through rock to create a dedicated air pathway, but were met with a dismissive rejection, along the lines of: We dig coal, not rock.
Inspectors have cited the company at least a dozen times over the past two years for failing to maintain or properly operate doors intended to direct air flow inside the mine. In November, an inspector found two large holes in the set of doors cited by the foreman, and noted that a large amount of air was escaping.
According to two other miners who had worked for several years at Upper Big Branch and asked not to be identified in order to keep their jobs, the pressure to run coal was so intense at times that any claim of a commitment to safety seemed like part of some absurdist play. Entrance guards would alert the miners when an inspector was on the way down. Equipment that measured coal dust was manipulated by placing it in areas with cleaner air before inspectors checked it. Curtains that directed clean air were moved around to favorably skew readings.
Daniel Woods, a federal mining inspector from Man, W.Va., on disability leave, said that Massey mines were some of the most difficult to handle. Inspections that should have taken a day took three, he said, because the first day would be spent arguing with Massey operators over paperwork and permission to enter certain sections. The company was far more likely than others to complain about inspectors it thought were too aggressive, and eventually the mine safety agency would send different inspectors, he said.
And then there were the lifelines: the steel cables that hang from the ceiling and run the length of the tunnels, intended to guide miners in darkness and smoke out of dangerous situations and into safety.
The company knew the importance of lifelines because it had been cited more than two dozen times since January 2009 for not properly maintaining them. Last summer, for example, an inspector ordered workers out of the mine after discovering several hazards, including an incorrect escape route map, a part of that route underwater — and a long stretch of lifeline missing.
According to the foreman, a few months ago the company built a wall to try and address some of the mine’s ventilation problems. That wall was still in place at the time of the explosion.
The only problem, he said: The new wall cut off a lifeline.
A Criminal Fire
Four years ago, in another southern West Virginia coal mine owned by a Massey subsidiary, a preventable fire broke out two miles below the surface. A faulty conveyor belt that should have been better maintained ignited some coal spillage that should not have been allowed to accumulate, federal investigators found in a report compiled after the incident.
One of the miners hurriedly tried to connect a fire hose to a nearby water valve, but this was futile; the threads of the coupling and the outlet were not compatible. The miner then tried to open the valve — just to get water on the fire — but the line was dry. And things only got worse.
The miner belonged to a crew working in Massey’s Aracoma Alma mine. In a memorandum issued three months before this fire and widely disseminated in 2006, Mr. Blankenship, the company’s chief executive, ordered subordinates to run coal and ignore everything else. A week later he sent a follow-up memo saying that, of course, safety comes first — and that he would “question the membership” of any employee who thought he meant anything other than that.
Now, on the evening of Jan. 19, 2006, just hours after Aracoma officials received yet another handwritten note from Mr. Blankenship — “Stay on coal,” it said in part — a fire had broken out, again, on a misaligned conveyor belt, there was no water, and smoke was thickening.
“You could hear stuff falling and cracking and popping,” a miner named Jonah Rose later said, according to a state report by J. Davitt McAteer, a prominent mine-safety consultant who is now leading a state investigation into the Upper Big Branch explosion. “It sounded like thunder coming through there.”
After a delay of nearly half an hour, the crew of a dozen miners was ordered to evacuate. They rode a mantrip down the primary escape path — only to run into thick, impassable smoke. Holes in a ventilation wall had been created weeks earlier to accommodate electrical equipment, it turned out, effectively compromising the escape tunnel’s fresh air.
The men stumbled out of the vehicle, hollering to stick together, fumbling to don their portable breathing devices, at least one of them vomiting before his air supply halted the sensation of suffocating. Then, as best as they could in the blinding pitch of smoke, the miners felt their way along the coal wall, trying and not always succeeding to form a human chain of life support.
Somebody yelled a muffled something about a door, and the miners followed the voice. On the other side of the door, they could breathe, and see, and count: 10 now, instead of 12. Two roof-bolt operators, Ellery Hatfield and Don Israel Bragg, were missing.
Three miners went back into the smoke, repeatedly removing their masks to shout for the men they called Elvis and Riz. “You could hear them hollering at the top of their lungs, hollering for them,” another miner recalled. But there was no answer.
Two days later, rescuers — whose many obstacles included the inaccurate mine maps provided by the company — found the bodies. Mr. Bragg was 33; Mr. Hatfield was 46.
As in the past, as in the future, state and federal inspection reports provided disturbing context. The Aracoma mine had received more than two-dozen violations in the months just before the fire, including several that cited problems with its ventilation system and three that raised alarms about the build-up of combustible coal dust and spillage.
In addition, Aracoma miners later told investigators that they had put out two other fires caused by faulty conveyor belts in the two weeks before the fatal fire. Neither of these fires was reported to state or federal officials.
In the fall of 2008, the widows of Mr. Bragg and Mr. Hatfield settled their lawsuit against various Massey entities and Mr. Blankenship in midtrial, for an undisclosed amount.
Then, in April 2009, the Aracoma Coal Company, a Massey subsidiary, pleaded guilty to several counts of willfully violating mandatory safety standards, and agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal fines and civil penalties. The Department of Justice described it as the largest financial settlement in the coal industry’s history.
After the fire, court files indicate, Aracoma installed state-of-the-art fire suppression systems, provided training and technologies for emergency mine evacuation, and adopted other safety measures that in hindsight seem obvious.
But ventilation problems similar to those found at Aracoma were also part of a citation issued on Jan. 7 of this year to Upper Big Branch.
“What we’re afraid of is that the same types of ugly conditions at Aracoma may resurface again at Upper Big Branch,” said Bruce Stanley, the lawyer for the two Aracoma widows. “And that perhaps the lessons of Aracoma might not have been learned.”
A Different Kind of Mine
A morning shift of miners disappeared last week into an Appalachian foothill. Wearing blue jumpsuits with orange reflective tape and hardhats with lights, they crouched into small cable cars and descended some 750 feet into the E3-1 mine, the subterranean maze in Hazard that is their place of work.
They breathed air that was cool, fresh and breezy, thanks to a fan system stronger than federal regulations require. They carried portable emergency-breathing devices with which they had all trained four times a year under smoky conditions, well beyond the federal requirement of once a year. (The Massey foreman said such training does not happen that often.)
Theirs is a room-and-pillar mine, in which natural pillars are left during the coal removal to support the roof, some of which are later removed. According to company officials, most mines that use this method create 40-square-foot pillars every 90 feet, while the pillars here measure 70 square feet. (Some mining experts consider this method riskier than the longwall mining approach at Upper Big Branch.)
Typical of the safety measures in evidence are the identification tags on the power breakers. They include explanatory pictures, and not just names or numbers, to reduce the risk of one of the many power lines being plugged into the wrong receptacle, which could lead to electrocution. Massey has no such system, according to the foreman.
In particular, TECO says it emphasizes that the mine be examined before every shift — a federal requirement that has drawn several Massey violations and one that Mr. McAteer, the mine-safety consultant, has repeatedly said is of the utmost importance.
Between the three shifts, foremen at E3-1 test methane levels, check the heavy plastic curtains that help to control air flow, and inspect for cracks in the roof.
“It’s common sense, not high tech,” said Dave Blankenship, TECO’s director of safety and environmental affairs. (He is not related to Massey’s chairman.)
These safety practices did not develop in a vacuum. Five years ago, about a year after the mine opened, one of the heavy plastic curtains that help to control air flow fell down, and a foreman failed to hang it back up. Methane collected, ignited, and created a brief flash fire that caused no injuries but earned two significant violations from federal inspectors.
The foreman was fired, and a machine operator was suspended for three days. “It sent a signal,” Mr. Blankenship said.
The company’s safety record is very good, but not perfect. Five months ago, above ground, an independent contractor was killed and another was seriously injured when a boom fell on them while they worked on building an air shaft for E3-1. Federal inspectors ruled that Perry Coal Company, the TECO subsidiary, had not secured the boom in place; the company is contesting the citation.
The company is also contesting a $70,000 fine for another incident from last year, in which a worker injured his sacrum, or tailbone, while working on machinery that inspectors also say was not properly secured.
Over all, though, the operation at E3-1 rates well. It has no fatalities, no evacuations for ventilation problems since 2004, and, for the last five years, an injury rate well below the national average in mines.
The shift ended. Miners climbed into the cable cars that would safely take them back up to late-afternoon daylight, where the dogwood and Eastern red bud trees colored the landscape, and where the mining supervisor gave them license to talk to a visiting reporter, on or off the record.
All 10 miners approached by the reporter agreed to talk. All 10 agreed that the supervisors of the E3-1 mine emphasized safety and encouraged cooperation with the state and federal inspectors who are frequently on site.
Gary Caudill, 56 years old and with 30 years in the mines, said that E3-1 was the gassiest mine he had ever been in. But, he said: “I’ve worked for a lot of mines, and this is the safest. If they come in and a curtain is not up, the man responsible would be fired.”
Before calling it a day, 35 of these miners gathered in a paneled room of wooden benches and metal lockers for their weekly safety meeting, where the words “Safety on Call” loom above the door. Some sat, most stood, and all listened in silence as their mine safety inspector, Rocky Moore, began the session by bringing up the Upper Big Branch disaster.
Mr. Moore repeated what the men already knew, that 29 men had lost their lives in an explosion whose cause remained under investigation. Still, he said, the men before him must remain alert about methane.
He emphasized the importance of the plastic curtains that help to direct air flow. He read aloud a series of best practices for preventing underground explosions: clean up loose coal; check seals; maintain sufficient ventilation; and, again, test frequently for methane.
He asked if anyone had any questions. There were none.
“Just be sure you all be careful,” Mr. Moore said in closing. “And see Mama when you get off work.”
His words carried these weary miners out into the fresh afternoon, where the white and purple-pink blooms of spring adorned the hillside.
Andrew W. Lehren, Janet Roberts, Michael Cooper and Dan Heyman contributed reporting.
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Sunday, April 18, 2010
Federal regulatory system sanctions deadly conditions in US mines
Federal regulatory system sanctions deadly conditions in US mines
Federal regulatory system sanctions deadly conditions in US mines
By Samuel Davidson
15 April 2010
More questions are emerging as to why Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) officials did not shut down Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine before the April 5 explosion which killed 29 coal miners.
Last year MSHA inspectors issued 515 citations for safety violations at the mine. In the first three months of this year, MSHA inspectors cited Massey for another 124 safety violations—a rate of 10 per week. Yet MSHA officials—who work for the Obama administration’s Labor Department—never designated the mine as having a “pattern of violations,” which would have given inspectors greater power to enforce safety standards, including ceasing operations at the mine.
Miners and the friends and families of those who were killed have been asking the obvious question as to why MSHA, the government agency mandated to ensure the safety of miners, allowed Massey to continue to put miners’ lives at risk despite its flagrant disregard for the most basic safety requirements.
MSHA officials are now blaming their failure to enforce safety laws on a “computer programming error” that Greg Wagner, deputy assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said only affected the Upper Big Branch mine. According to Wagner, the program failed to pick up eight “unwarrantable failure” enforcement orders issued by MSHA inspectors, which he said were needed to issue the mine a “patterns of violation” letter. “Unwarrantable failures” are citations issued when the violations are so blatant and known to management that MSHA concludes mine officials purposefully ignored them.
The excuse was met with such disbelief that Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis had to issue a statement saying the computer error “did not have an impact on this tragedy” just “the way information was provided to the public.”
Under federal law, MSHA officials can take certain steps to close a mine they find unsafe. They can seek a federal court injunction to shut a mine if their inspectors can show that it “constitutes a continuing hazard to the health and safety of miners.” MSHA officials never sought a court injunction against Massey despite ample evidence of impending disaster, including dangerously high levels of explosive methane gas and coal dust.
Even without a court order mine inspectors can issue a “withdrawal order” that requires all miners to leave the mine or a part of the mine until the problem has been resolved. A withdrawal order can be issued when inspectors find a situation threatens the immediate health and safety of the miners.
Safety inspectors had issued 54 such “withdrawal orders” at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2009, and another seven since the beginning of 2010. Withdrawal orders were being issued at the rate of one per week.
Designating a mine as having a “pattern of violations,” would give safety inspectors greater power in enforcing safety compliance. Each time an inspector found a serious violation, that section of the mine could be closed.
However, MSHA has set an almost impossible standard for inspectors to establish such a pattern at a mine. MSHA, in deference to the coal operators’ demand that production is never halted, has set 10 different criteria for inspectors to meet to demonstrate such a “pattern of violations.”
Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine met 9 out of the 10 criteria. The one unmet criterion was that the mine had supposedly not been issued any withdrawal orders. In fact, Massey had been issued scores of such orders resulting in the temporary closure of all or part of the mine 61 times since the beginning of 2009, including seven times this year. However, the company and its lawyers appealed each one of the withdrawal orders, so they are not considered actual violations until the case in concluded, a MSHA official explained.
Since 2007, Massey and other mine operators have appealed the vast majority of citations, creating a mountain of backlogged cases for the ten MSHA officials who hear the cases.
Many of the withdrawal orders involved “poor ventilation and coal dust control,” meaning inspectors considered that there was a danger of explosion. Another of the citations Massey is appealing involved having bad, ie., dust and gas-ladden, air blowing onto the face of the mine where a longwall machine was cutting coal—more than a sufficient source of sparks to ignite explosive gases. Another was for having an airflow half of what was needed to prevent the buildup of methane gas.
The exact cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, but most miners and investigators feel it was likely a methane explosion followed by a coal dust explosion. Many veteran inspectors have said they have never before seen an explosion of such magnitude that tore the mine apart and bent iron tracks like pretzels, according to one account.
So arcane are the regulations that even if MSHA officials determined that Massey violated all 10 of their criteria, they could not designate the mine as having a “pattern of violations” without first sending the mine operator a warning letter and giving the company 90 days to show a reduction in serious violations, avoiding the added scrutiny.
The ten criteria were established under the Bush administration in 2007 following the January 2006 disaster at the Sago mine, which killed 12 West Virginia miners. The Bush administration established the system as a means of deflecting criticism after MSHA was criticized for its failure to prevent the Sago disaster. This gave the appearance of increased enforcement and fines, but created a giant loophole that enabled coal operators to challenge safety violations and continue operating unsafe mines even when regulators concluded imminent dangers existed.
Since taking office, the Obama administration, which appointed longtime United Mine Workers of America safety director Joe Main to head MSHA, has not made any changes to this bogus regulatory system. At the same time Main has upheld other Bush-era measures that favor the coal companies, including unsafe limits on coal dust exposure, which produces deadly black lung disease. Just like his Republican predecessor, Obama—who was elected with the backing of southern Illinois coal interests—is sanctioning the continuing exploitation and killing of miners in order to boost the profits of the coal and energy conglomerates.
While most of the focus has been on the Upper Big Branch mine, federal records show that Massey Energy has been fighting safety standards, including ventilation problems and coal dust control, at several of its other mines. Two other Massey mines, one in Wyoming County, West Virginia, and the other in Pike County, Kentucky, have been cited by safety inspectors for numerous ventilation problems, including several “unwarrantable failures” for ventilation plans and coal dust control.
Massey was not the exception to the rule. On Wednesday, officials in Washington released a list of 48 mines identified by federal mine safety officials in August 2009 for increased scrutiny, but which were not targeted due to unresolved appeals filed by mine operators
Federal regulatory system sanctions deadly conditions in US mines
By Samuel Davidson
15 April 2010
More questions are emerging as to why Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) officials did not shut down Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine before the April 5 explosion which killed 29 coal miners.
Last year MSHA inspectors issued 515 citations for safety violations at the mine. In the first three months of this year, MSHA inspectors cited Massey for another 124 safety violations—a rate of 10 per week. Yet MSHA officials—who work for the Obama administration’s Labor Department—never designated the mine as having a “pattern of violations,” which would have given inspectors greater power to enforce safety standards, including ceasing operations at the mine.
Miners and the friends and families of those who were killed have been asking the obvious question as to why MSHA, the government agency mandated to ensure the safety of miners, allowed Massey to continue to put miners’ lives at risk despite its flagrant disregard for the most basic safety requirements.
MSHA officials are now blaming their failure to enforce safety laws on a “computer programming error” that Greg Wagner, deputy assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said only affected the Upper Big Branch mine. According to Wagner, the program failed to pick up eight “unwarrantable failure” enforcement orders issued by MSHA inspectors, which he said were needed to issue the mine a “patterns of violation” letter. “Unwarrantable failures” are citations issued when the violations are so blatant and known to management that MSHA concludes mine officials purposefully ignored them.
The excuse was met with such disbelief that Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis had to issue a statement saying the computer error “did not have an impact on this tragedy” just “the way information was provided to the public.”
Under federal law, MSHA officials can take certain steps to close a mine they find unsafe. They can seek a federal court injunction to shut a mine if their inspectors can show that it “constitutes a continuing hazard to the health and safety of miners.” MSHA officials never sought a court injunction against Massey despite ample evidence of impending disaster, including dangerously high levels of explosive methane gas and coal dust.
Even without a court order mine inspectors can issue a “withdrawal order” that requires all miners to leave the mine or a part of the mine until the problem has been resolved. A withdrawal order can be issued when inspectors find a situation threatens the immediate health and safety of the miners.
Safety inspectors had issued 54 such “withdrawal orders” at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2009, and another seven since the beginning of 2010. Withdrawal orders were being issued at the rate of one per week.
Designating a mine as having a “pattern of violations,” would give safety inspectors greater power in enforcing safety compliance. Each time an inspector found a serious violation, that section of the mine could be closed.
However, MSHA has set an almost impossible standard for inspectors to establish such a pattern at a mine. MSHA, in deference to the coal operators’ demand that production is never halted, has set 10 different criteria for inspectors to meet to demonstrate such a “pattern of violations.”
Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine met 9 out of the 10 criteria. The one unmet criterion was that the mine had supposedly not been issued any withdrawal orders. In fact, Massey had been issued scores of such orders resulting in the temporary closure of all or part of the mine 61 times since the beginning of 2009, including seven times this year. However, the company and its lawyers appealed each one of the withdrawal orders, so they are not considered actual violations until the case in concluded, a MSHA official explained.
Since 2007, Massey and other mine operators have appealed the vast majority of citations, creating a mountain of backlogged cases for the ten MSHA officials who hear the cases.
Many of the withdrawal orders involved “poor ventilation and coal dust control,” meaning inspectors considered that there was a danger of explosion. Another of the citations Massey is appealing involved having bad, ie., dust and gas-ladden, air blowing onto the face of the mine where a longwall machine was cutting coal—more than a sufficient source of sparks to ignite explosive gases. Another was for having an airflow half of what was needed to prevent the buildup of methane gas.
The exact cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, but most miners and investigators feel it was likely a methane explosion followed by a coal dust explosion. Many veteran inspectors have said they have never before seen an explosion of such magnitude that tore the mine apart and bent iron tracks like pretzels, according to one account.
So arcane are the regulations that even if MSHA officials determined that Massey violated all 10 of their criteria, they could not designate the mine as having a “pattern of violations” without first sending the mine operator a warning letter and giving the company 90 days to show a reduction in serious violations, avoiding the added scrutiny.
The ten criteria were established under the Bush administration in 2007 following the January 2006 disaster at the Sago mine, which killed 12 West Virginia miners. The Bush administration established the system as a means of deflecting criticism after MSHA was criticized for its failure to prevent the Sago disaster. This gave the appearance of increased enforcement and fines, but created a giant loophole that enabled coal operators to challenge safety violations and continue operating unsafe mines even when regulators concluded imminent dangers existed.
Since taking office, the Obama administration, which appointed longtime United Mine Workers of America safety director Joe Main to head MSHA, has not made any changes to this bogus regulatory system. At the same time Main has upheld other Bush-era measures that favor the coal companies, including unsafe limits on coal dust exposure, which produces deadly black lung disease. Just like his Republican predecessor, Obama—who was elected with the backing of southern Illinois coal interests—is sanctioning the continuing exploitation and killing of miners in order to boost the profits of the coal and energy conglomerates.
While most of the focus has been on the Upper Big Branch mine, federal records show that Massey Energy has been fighting safety standards, including ventilation problems and coal dust control, at several of its other mines. Two other Massey mines, one in Wyoming County, West Virginia, and the other in Pike County, Kentucky, have been cited by safety inspectors for numerous ventilation problems, including several “unwarrantable failures” for ventilation plans and coal dust control.
Massey was not the exception to the rule. On Wednesday, officials in Washington released a list of 48 mines identified by federal mine safety officials in August 2009 for increased scrutiny, but which were not targeted due to unresolved appeals filed by mine operators
Fw: Maxo Vanko sees ghost in church March 1938
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> Thank you Charlie for organizing the tour Ronald and I enjoyed!
The Truth About Don Blankenship | VF Daily | Vanity Fair
The Truth About Don Blankenship | VF Daily | Vanity Fair
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The Magazine
The Truth About Don Blankenship
by Michael Shnayerson
April 15, 2010, 11:55 PM
By Haraz N. Ghanbari/A.P. Photo.
Last week, Diane Sawyer and other national reporters discovered what West Virginians have known for years: Don Blankenship is the Snidely Whiplash of coal, a larger-than-life figure so swaggering and creepy that his each next outrageous claim as chairman and C.E.O. of Massey Energy makes wonderful copy. But in the aftermath of the explosion that killed 29 at his Upper Big Branch mine an hour or so south of Charleston, they weren’t sure how to react when Don, in that soft Appalachian twang of his, declared Massey’s safety record better than the industry average, and said, in effect, that coal mining is a dangerous business and that accidents happen. Soon enough, they realized Don’s claim was flat wrong: Upper Big Branch’s injury rate was higher than the national average. But how much personal responsibility did the head of America’s fourth-largest coal company bear for the tragedy? That was a question they couldn’t answer from one quick trip to the coalfields.
From a dozen or more trips to Coal River valley over the last several years, I have my own thoughts about that.
First for Vanity Fair in 2006, and then for my book “Coal River” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) in 2008, I followed Don as the bête noir of mountaintop-removal mining, the awful practice by which central Appalachia’s forested ridgetops are being destroyed. In trying to understand him, and why he seemed to court his notoriety, I found myself following the story of a mine called … Upper Big Branch. It wasn’t a mountaintop operation, but its story said a lot about Don and how he operated, so I used it anyway.
It seems only more revealing now.
The story traces to early 1993, when Massey bought Montcoal, which would come to include Upper Big Branch, from Peabody Coal. Montcoal was a union-run operation, one of a dwindling number since Don had embarked on his one-man campaign, in the mid-1980s, to break the United Mine Workers’ hold on coal in the valley. Usually, Massey would just shut down a newly acquired mine for a year, let the union contract expire, and reopen it as non-union with his own miners. (The erstwhile union members were effectively blackballed for life at all Massey mines.) But in a rare concession to the U.M.W.A., Don agreed to let union members constitute two-thirds of the subsidiary he now called Performance Coal, with non-union Massey workers making up the rest. At some future date, the miners would all vote on whether to revert to being a union operation or not. How could the U.M.W.A. lose?
In the fall of 1995, Don began flying in by helicopter to address the men. He told the union workers how much more money they’d make as non-union miners, including bonuses. “You’ve been promising these bonuses since we started,” observed one union man, Jerry Shelton. “But we’ve never received but one, for $40. How do you explain that?”
Don glowered, then explained that the more the men worked, the more money they’d make. “So your message is the more hours you put in, the more you make,” Jerry said. “Well, anyone knows that.”
The election came out a dead tie: 46–46.
In May 1997, another election was scheduled. This time, the miners were put on buses to Nashville to hear country-music stars. They took a second trip to Dollywood, and a third to the Busch Gardens adventure park in Williamsburg, Virginia. At each gathering, Don addressed the miners to tell them how well Massey took care of its own. Jerry Shelton observed that a number of men who seemed on the fence about how to vote began building new homes and coming to work in new cars. When he confronted one of them, the man looked away. “I have to take care of my family,” he said.
The second election went just as Massey hoped: the union was voted down.
With that, almost overnight, everything changed. Production was stepped up 70 percent, one manager later told me, but bonuses were cut in half. Both managers and miners now had to work much longer hours, in many cases 12-hour shifts rather than 8-hour shifts, so that Massey had to pay only two shifts’ worth of benefits in the mine’s 24-hour day.
One by one at Upper Big Branch, the union men were eased out, either from injuries sustained from the longer shifts and harder working conditions, or on pretexts. The closer they were to retirement—and retirement benefits—the likelier it seemed that they would lose their jobs. Around Massey, the word was that “Mr. B,” as Don liked to be called, wanted to see the average age of Massey’s workers go down to 25. There was a saying at Upper Big Branch: “A man is like a tool. If it’s bent or broke, get rid of it, and get you a new one.”
Don made fewer helicopter trips to Upper Big Branch now, but his presence was keenly felt. In one of the managers’ offices, I was told, a red phone was installed, with a direct line to Mr. B. Production figures were relayed to Mr. B every day; if the line stopped for even an hour, the on-site managers had to explain why. Purchase orders for the smallest items had to be cleared with Don: one manager told me of his amazement in learning, soon after arriving at Massey, that Don had to sign off on a tankful of gas for the manager’s Massey truck. At all of Massey’s subsidiaries, managers knew that running coal was their top priority. “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,” Don wrote in a now infamous memo in 2005. Shortly after, when a deadly fire broke out at another Massey mine, Aracoma, killing two men, that memo helped federal prosecutors and the Mine Safety and Health Administration determine that Massey had violated mandatory safety standards. In 2008, Aracoma pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges.
Now, as federal investigators sift through the debris at Upper Big Branch, and study the more than 500 violations and $897,325 in fines incurred by the operation in 2009—many of which Massey has appealed—I hope they keep one question uppermost in mind. Did Appalachia’s most notorious coal baron sign off himself on the decision to not worry about coal-dust build-ups and ventilation problems with deadly methane—the very same issues that caused the fire at Aracoma? If history is any guide, the investigative interviews will be held in private, yet with coal-company lawyers present—a sorry indication of the industry’s clout at the highest levels—so we may never know. But the newly appointed head of an independent state investigation, J. Davitt McAteer, is the right man for the job—a former M.S.H.A. assistant secretary in the Clinton administration who knows all about Massey, and Don—so he may surprise us. Perhaps, if he does, we may even find out what, if any, directives the mine’s managers got in the days before the tragedy from the man on the other end of the red phone.
• RELATED: “The Rape of Appalachia,” by Michael Shnayerson (May 2006)
Keywords:
Appalachia, Coal Mining, Don Blankenship, Featured, Massey Energy, Politics, Upper Big Branch disaster
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The Magazine
The Truth About Don Blankenship
by Michael Shnayerson
April 15, 2010, 11:55 PM
By Haraz N. Ghanbari/A.P. Photo.
Last week, Diane Sawyer and other national reporters discovered what West Virginians have known for years: Don Blankenship is the Snidely Whiplash of coal, a larger-than-life figure so swaggering and creepy that his each next outrageous claim as chairman and C.E.O. of Massey Energy makes wonderful copy. But in the aftermath of the explosion that killed 29 at his Upper Big Branch mine an hour or so south of Charleston, they weren’t sure how to react when Don, in that soft Appalachian twang of his, declared Massey’s safety record better than the industry average, and said, in effect, that coal mining is a dangerous business and that accidents happen. Soon enough, they realized Don’s claim was flat wrong: Upper Big Branch’s injury rate was higher than the national average. But how much personal responsibility did the head of America’s fourth-largest coal company bear for the tragedy? That was a question they couldn’t answer from one quick trip to the coalfields.
From a dozen or more trips to Coal River valley over the last several years, I have my own thoughts about that.
First for Vanity Fair in 2006, and then for my book “Coal River” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) in 2008, I followed Don as the bête noir of mountaintop-removal mining, the awful practice by which central Appalachia’s forested ridgetops are being destroyed. In trying to understand him, and why he seemed to court his notoriety, I found myself following the story of a mine called … Upper Big Branch. It wasn’t a mountaintop operation, but its story said a lot about Don and how he operated, so I used it anyway.
It seems only more revealing now.
The story traces to early 1993, when Massey bought Montcoal, which would come to include Upper Big Branch, from Peabody Coal. Montcoal was a union-run operation, one of a dwindling number since Don had embarked on his one-man campaign, in the mid-1980s, to break the United Mine Workers’ hold on coal in the valley. Usually, Massey would just shut down a newly acquired mine for a year, let the union contract expire, and reopen it as non-union with his own miners. (The erstwhile union members were effectively blackballed for life at all Massey mines.) But in a rare concession to the U.M.W.A., Don agreed to let union members constitute two-thirds of the subsidiary he now called Performance Coal, with non-union Massey workers making up the rest. At some future date, the miners would all vote on whether to revert to being a union operation or not. How could the U.M.W.A. lose?
In the fall of 1995, Don began flying in by helicopter to address the men. He told the union workers how much more money they’d make as non-union miners, including bonuses. “You’ve been promising these bonuses since we started,” observed one union man, Jerry Shelton. “But we’ve never received but one, for $40. How do you explain that?”
Don glowered, then explained that the more the men worked, the more money they’d make. “So your message is the more hours you put in, the more you make,” Jerry said. “Well, anyone knows that.”
The election came out a dead tie: 46–46.
In May 1997, another election was scheduled. This time, the miners were put on buses to Nashville to hear country-music stars. They took a second trip to Dollywood, and a third to the Busch Gardens adventure park in Williamsburg, Virginia. At each gathering, Don addressed the miners to tell them how well Massey took care of its own. Jerry Shelton observed that a number of men who seemed on the fence about how to vote began building new homes and coming to work in new cars. When he confronted one of them, the man looked away. “I have to take care of my family,” he said.
The second election went just as Massey hoped: the union was voted down.
With that, almost overnight, everything changed. Production was stepped up 70 percent, one manager later told me, but bonuses were cut in half. Both managers and miners now had to work much longer hours, in many cases 12-hour shifts rather than 8-hour shifts, so that Massey had to pay only two shifts’ worth of benefits in the mine’s 24-hour day.
One by one at Upper Big Branch, the union men were eased out, either from injuries sustained from the longer shifts and harder working conditions, or on pretexts. The closer they were to retirement—and retirement benefits—the likelier it seemed that they would lose their jobs. Around Massey, the word was that “Mr. B,” as Don liked to be called, wanted to see the average age of Massey’s workers go down to 25. There was a saying at Upper Big Branch: “A man is like a tool. If it’s bent or broke, get rid of it, and get you a new one.”
Don made fewer helicopter trips to Upper Big Branch now, but his presence was keenly felt. In one of the managers’ offices, I was told, a red phone was installed, with a direct line to Mr. B. Production figures were relayed to Mr. B every day; if the line stopped for even an hour, the on-site managers had to explain why. Purchase orders for the smallest items had to be cleared with Don: one manager told me of his amazement in learning, soon after arriving at Massey, that Don had to sign off on a tankful of gas for the manager’s Massey truck. At all of Massey’s subsidiaries, managers knew that running coal was their top priority. “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,” Don wrote in a now infamous memo in 2005. Shortly after, when a deadly fire broke out at another Massey mine, Aracoma, killing two men, that memo helped federal prosecutors and the Mine Safety and Health Administration determine that Massey had violated mandatory safety standards. In 2008, Aracoma pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges.
Now, as federal investigators sift through the debris at Upper Big Branch, and study the more than 500 violations and $897,325 in fines incurred by the operation in 2009—many of which Massey has appealed—I hope they keep one question uppermost in mind. Did Appalachia’s most notorious coal baron sign off himself on the decision to not worry about coal-dust build-ups and ventilation problems with deadly methane—the very same issues that caused the fire at Aracoma? If history is any guide, the investigative interviews will be held in private, yet with coal-company lawyers present—a sorry indication of the industry’s clout at the highest levels—so we may never know. But the newly appointed head of an independent state investigation, J. Davitt McAteer, is the right man for the job—a former M.S.H.A. assistant secretary in the Clinton administration who knows all about Massey, and Don—so he may surprise us. Perhaps, if he does, we may even find out what, if any, directives the mine’s managers got in the days before the tragedy from the man on the other end of the red phone.
• RELATED: “The Rape of Appalachia,” by Michael Shnayerson (May 2006)
Keywords:
Appalachia, Coal Mining, Don Blankenship, Featured, Massey Energy, Politics, Upper Big Branch disaster
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Fw: Jail for Massey's Blankenship
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Fw: As rescue efforts continue, safety history at Upper Big Branch mine and Massey troubling
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