Coal mine safety, especially in non-union mines, traditionally has seem weighted in favor of mine owners. Regulators make periodic visits, and often issue warnings about potential hazards. Mine owners make some corrections, object to other citations, and bog down the safety enforcement process in rebuttals and appeals. Against the backdrop of this coy minuet, miners continue working — all the while trying to skirt the tragedy invited by this sham.
Given the records of safety inspections released Thursday by federal regulators, such a sham appears to lie at the roots of the massive explosion at Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia last Monday. That explosion took the lives of at least 25 miners who were unable to evade tragedy, and left the fate of four others uncertain.
From the post-explosion perspective, the mine’s safety record appears needlessly and recklessly bleak. It appears to have been manipulatively managed to avoid a regulatory finding of “a pattern of violations,” a finding that would have made it subject to a mandatory shutdown in the event of another single safety citation from regulators.
According to reports posted by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, inspectors warned Massey Energy on Dec. 6, 2007, that the Upper Big Branch mine’s record of 204 “serious and significant” violations of mine safety rules in the previous two years presented “a potential pattern of violations.” (Emphasis ours). That number was nearly twice the national average in that two-year period.
If the office of mine safety had been able to assert definitively that the Massey Energy mine’s record exhibited an actual pattern of significant safety violations, rather than a potential pattern, it would have had authority to shut the mine down in the event of additional single violation. But under the rules that guide it — rules that defy common sense — the Office of Mine Safety is first required to issue a warning of a potential pattern of violations. If the company reduces its infractions by 30 percent, the office is required not to issue the more serious declaration of a pattern of violations.