May 19, 2011
Mine Owner’s Negligence Led to Blast, Study Finds
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT

WASHINGTON — In the first comprehensive state report on the 2010 coal
mine disaster in West Virginia, an independent team of investigators put
the blame squarely on the owner of the mine, Massey Energy, concluding
that it had “made life difficult” for miners who tried to address safety
and built “a culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable.”

The report, released Thursday by an independent team appointed by the
former West Virginia governor, Joe Manchin III, and led by the former
federal mine safety chief Davitt McAteer, echoed preliminary findings by
federal officials that the blast could have been prevented if Massey had
observed minimal safety standards.

But it was more pointed in naming Massey as the culprit, using blunt
language to describe what it said was a pattern of negligence that
ultimately led to the deaths of 29 miners on April 5, 2010, in the worst
American mining disaster in 40 years.

“The story of Upper Big Branch is a cautionary tale of hubris,” the
report concluded. “A company that was a towering presence in the
Appalachian coalfields operated its mines in a profoundly reckless
manner, and 29 coal miners paid with their lives for the corporate
risk-taking.”

In a statement on Thursday, Massey Energy’s general counsel, Shane
Harvey, disputed some of the report’s findings. Seventeen company
executives refused to be interviewed, a choice Mr. McAteer called “most
unfortunate.”

The 120-page report offered a scathing indictment of Massey practices at
the mine, called Upper Big Branch, pieced together through months of
interviews, and analyzing documents, data and correspondence.

Workers at the mine knew that conditions were bad, and the report opens
with a passage about one miner’s fears the day before he died in the
disaster.

“Man, they got us up there mining, and we ain’t got no air,” the
miner, Gary Wayne Quarles, told a friend, who talked to investigators.
“I’m just scared to death to go to work because I’m just scared to death
something bad is going to happen.”

The report goes on to say that a “perfect storm” was brewing inside the
mine, of poor ventilation, equipment whose safety mechanisms were not
functioning and combustible coal dust, “behaving like a line of
gunpowder carrying the blast forward in multiple directions.”

Investigators flatly rejected the conclusion offered by Massey
officials — that the explosion occurred because a giant burst of
methane bubbled from the ground, an event that would have been
impossible to predict or control.

For more, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us...e.html?_r=1&hp