Scot Free

29 men were killed, 19 died as a result of carbon monoxide intoxication and 10 as a result of injuries suffered in the explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine. We posted about the mining disaster previously , here and here

A 126-page Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel report was released last month to little media attention. Its conclusion: “Ultimately, the responsibility for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine lies with the management of Massey Energy. The company broke faith with its workers by frequently and knowingly violating the law and blatantly disregarding known safety practices.”

The explosion occurred when a spark—which occurs frequently when cutting coal due to friction—ignited an explosive accumulation of methane, causing a fireball. The fireball in turn ignited coal dust that had been allowed to build up, and the coal dust carried the explosion throughout more than two miles of the mine. The methane and coal dust accumulated because of an inadequate ventilation system—the same one Quarles and so many of his co-workers had complained resulted in “no air” circulating where they were mining. The coal dust remained hazardous due to inadequate “rock dusting” which is used to render coal dust inert—Massey only had two men responsible for dusting the entire mine on a part-time basis, when the size justified a two-man crew assigned solely to rock dusting on at least two shifts every day. Finally, the fire spread due to Massey’s failure to maintain vital safety equipment—missing or clogged water sprays could have doused the fire at the point of ignition.

Massey had ample warnings about these safety problems. “Pre-shift examinations” between January and April 2010 identified 1,834 instances when rock dusting was needed, and only 302 times when it was performed—in fact, fireboss Michael Elswick, who was killed after just 4 days on the job, reported that the conveyor belts needed to be cleaned and dusted just one-half hour before the explosion. Also, in fourteen out of fifteen months preceding the disaster, UBB received citations from federal or state inspectors regarding rock dust issues, and nearly half of the forty federal citations were classified as “significant and substantial.” In the months leading up to the explosion, one Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspector pulled workers from a section due to inadequate airflow, a MSHA ventilation specialist warned Massey of “a dangerous situation,” and a foreman was told by management to “ignore a citation” the mine received for faulty ventilation. Finally, a foreman who stopped his crew from working for one hour while trying to address ventilation problems was suspended for three days due to “poor work performance” (the executive who suspended him, Jason Whitehead, refused to cooperate with the investigation and was promoted to Massey’s vice president of Underground Operations several months after the disaster).

The report describes a “normalization of deviance” at Massey, where “wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm. It was acceptable to mine coal with insufficient air; with buildups of coal dust; with inadequate rock dust. The same culture allowed Massey Energy to use its resources to create a false public image to mislead the public, community leaders and investors – the perception that the company exceeded industry safety standards. And it became acceptable to cast agencies designed to protect miners as enemies and to make life difficult for miners who tried to address safety. It is only in the context of a culture bent on production at the expense of safety that these obvious deviations from decades of known safety practices make sense.”

Where is the justice? Where are the jail terms?

This month, Massey was sold to Alpha Natural Resources for $7.1 billion, creating the nation’s second largest coal company. Alpha CEO Kevin Crutchfield named Massey’s Chief Operating Officer Chris Adkins as one of two people charged with spearheading Alpha’s main safety program. Adkins took the Fifth during the independent investigation. Yet Crutchfield described the pairing of Adkins and another executive to lead Alpha’s safety program this way: “Can’t think of two better individuals to lead this effort.”

During the disaster Adkins reportedly told trained rescuers who were following critical safety protocols to disregard them. MSHA mine rescue team member Jerry Cook would later testify, “You know, it’s bad enough trying to find 29 people, you don’t need to have 40 more to look for…They just had a major explosion. They could’ve killed every one of us … We were expendable that night, that’s my opinion … they didn’t care what they did with us.”