Deadly Record: Massey’s Mine In Montcoal Has Been Cited For Over 3,000 Violations, Over $2.2 Million In Fines
ThinkProgress
By Brad
April 6, 2010
Massey Energy is actively contesting millions of dollars of fines for safety violations at its West Virginia coal mine where disaster struck yesterday afternoon. Twenty-five miners were killed and another four are missing after a explosion took place at 3 pm Monday at Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine-South between the towns of Montcoal and Naoma. It is “the most people killed in a U.S. mine since 1984, when 27 died in a fire at Emery Mining Corp.’s mine in Orangeville, Utah.” This deadly mine has been cited for over 3,000 violations by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), 638 since 2009:Since 1995, Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine has been cited for 3,007 safety violations. Massey is contesting 353 violations, and 127 are delinquent.
Massey is contesting over a third (34.7%) of the 516 safety citations the Upper Big Branch-South Mine received in 2009, its greatest count in the last 15 years.
In March 2010, 53 new safety citations were issued for Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine, including violations of its mine ventilation plan.
Massey is now contesting $1,128,833 in fines for safety violations at the deadly Upper Big Branch-South Mine, with a further $246,320 in delinquent fines:
Over $2.2 million in fines have been assessed against Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine since 1995, with $791,327 paid. Massey is contesting $1,128,833 in fines. Massey’s delinquent fines total $246,320.Massey is contesting $251,613 in fines for citations for Upper Big Branch-South Mine’s ventilation plan.
Before yesterday’s tragic explosion, there have been three fatalities at Massey’s Upper Big Branch-South Mine in the last twelve years — one each in 1998, 2001, and 2003. Massey’s corrupt CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce board member Don Blankenship, has previously told employees that it was more important to “run coal” than follow safety regulations.
In 2002, President George W. Bush “named former Massey Energy official Stanley Suboleski to the MSHA review commission that decides all legal matters under the Federal Mine Act,” and cut 170 positions from MSHA. Bush’s MSHA chief, Dick Stickler, was a former manager of Beth Energy mines, which “incurred injury rates double the national average.” On October 21, 2009, the Senate confirmed President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Stickler, Joe Main, a “career union official and mine safety expert.” Massey’s Suboleski is still an active review commissioner.
My Dad grew up in an Ohio River town not too far from Montcoal – a mining town full of [mostly Italian] immigrants ‘sponsored’ to America by the mines at the turn of the century [before last]. It was a dark, harsh life. "The mines were closed." "The mines are hiring." But the worst was, "There’s been a mining accident." The black faced miners and their wives, dressed in black, would gather on the porches awaiting the news – who made it out? who would never came home? Then soon back to work. Some of the saddest times were during the strikes. Apathy and alcohol, alternating with violence. The trains didn’t run. No one had any money. Then it would start over. My cousins mostly made it out of that bleak place like my Dad and one brother before them. They escaped as football players, or priests, or soldiers [or just about anything possible to find another life]. Some went to work for the "Strip Mines," the ones that took off the tops of the mountains pictured above around Montcoal. It was better than going "down the shaft," one cousin said. I guess that was right. My Dad looked at it as the price his father had paid for freedom and a better life for his kids. I guess that was right too. So now in 2010 – evil mine owners, unsafe mines, dead miners, new widows in black. This story seems very old to me – like it shouldn’t still be happening…
Thanks for that story. The only silver lining of the black tale of coal is the remarkable capacity of people to build something out of such darkness.
From the “big coincidence” department: Sunday afternoon I finished a historical novel published around 1950 by Ben Ames Williams titled “Owen Glen”. The story is set in an Ohio mining town between 1890 and 1898. The protagonist is the surviving son of a Welsh pick miner who was active in the organizations preceding the UMW.
The boy is good in school, is befriended by the publisher of the local weekly newspaper who gives him work and is interested in the boy’s intellectual development. Still, he accompanies Dad into the mines at age 14 and eventually becomes an elected officer in the local chapter of UMW. Sprinkled throughout the book are representations of what was published in the paper concerning life and developments around the community…who died in the mines, whose hands got severed while coupling the coal cars bearing a day’s worth of back breaking labor, the children starving during strikes or shutdowns, patent medicine advertisements, maneuvering between mine operators and miners and so on. In the background, McKinley, Cleveland, the Spanish American War, the young TR. Republicans were the good guys, Democrats the really bad guys.
The story(ies) are very old and it shouldn’t still be happening. The roots are not a lot different (my opinion here) from those sobs who packaged and sold poison peanut butter a year or so back, the criminals at Enron, Tyco, Goldman Sachs and AIG. Will the circle be unbroken.
Another good novel with coal mining as background is D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers.”