An old, sad story at a West Virginia mine

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, April 8, 2010; A21

There is a dispiriting and, yes, heartbreaking sameness about how we
respond to mining disasters.

The catastrophe at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, W.Va., has
taken at least 25 lives. An entire community stands in solidarity with
the families of the victims and hopes that some miners still trapped may
yet be rescued.

We celebrate the stoic sturdiness of mine workers who pursue their craft
with pride, bravery and full knowledge of the risks it entails.

Then we get to the questions about what might have been done to avert
the disaster. What was the role of the company that ran the mine? What
are the responsibilities of lawmakers and government regulators who
devise and enforce rules to protect those who, as an old union song put
it, dig the coal so the world can run?

We went through exactly this cycle after the Sago Mine catastrophe that
took 12 lives in January 2006. Later that year, Congress passed the Mine
Improvement and New Emergency Response Act. The MINER Act is "the most
significant mine safety legislation in 30 years," according to the Mine
Safety and Health Administration's Web site.

The law strengthened the agency's staff, increased penalties for
violations and, as The Post reported, "led to a higher number of
citations and penalties -- and more challenges by companies."

That last phrase is important. Companies just don't like regulation, and
Don L. Blankenship, the chief executive of Massey Energy, has a history
of challenging regulators in every way he can.

Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine has been cited for safety violations
1,342 times since 2005. Eighty-six of those citations -- 12 of them
coming just last month -- involved failing to follow a mine ventilation
plan to control methane and coal dust.

Not surprisingly, Blankenship views this as the cost of doing business.
"Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process," he
said in a radio interview with West Virginia Metro News. "There are
violations at every coal mine in America, and UBB [Upper Big Branch] was
a mine that had violations."

Congress will no doubt hold hearings, and we will learn just how
"normal" Massey's operation of Upper Big Branch was. According to the
New York Times, the company appealed at least 37 of the 50 citations it
received for serious safety violations in the past year.

Blankenship is also a poster child for why we need campaign finance laws
and why recent moves by the U.S. Supreme Court to weaken them are so
dangerous. Blankenship spent $3 million to help elect a justice to the
West Virginia Supreme Court who then twice provided the key vote that
set aside a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy.

Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that judges must
disqualify themselves in cases involving litigants from whom they
received large campaign contributions. But the margin on that case was
only 5 to 4. Chief Justice John Roberts, one of the dissenters, argued
that the majority's decision "will inevitably lead to an increase in
allegations that judges are biased, however groundless those charges may
be." No, don't question those judges, even when their campaigns get 3
million bucks.

That particular case concerned fraud, not mine regulation. But there's a
pattern here to which we should pay heed, and it involves power. Too
often, regulations are discussed in the abstract as a "burden" on
companies that expend substantial sums to resist them.

Only after disasters such as this one do we remember that regulations
exist for a reason, that their enforcement can, literally, be a matter
of life and death. We will eventually learn what went wrong at Upper Big
Branch and whether the safety violations were part of the problem. But
then what will we do?

In the 30th-anniversary edition of his classic book "Everything in Its
Path," sociologist Kai Erikson reflects on the meaning of an earlier
West Virginia mining disaster that he wrote about so powerfully, the
1972 flood in Logan County's Buffalo Creek.

Pondering his research in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Erikson
concludes that we live in "a world in which the most vulnerable of
people end up taking the brunt of disasters resulting both from natural
processes and from human activities." Perhaps the world will always be
this way. But can't we bend it toward justice, at least a little bit?
--
http://tinyurl.com/ykxp2ym

On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:11:30 -0400, hk
wrote:

An old, sad story at a West Virginia mine

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, April 8, 2010; A21

There is a dispiriting and, yes, heartbreaking sameness about how we
respond to mining disasters.


i predict that americans will rally to blankenship's defense, as some
are already doing. the teabaggers will call him a god. he's rich and
all he did was kill a few hard working americans.

big deal.