Toll Mounts in West Virginia Coal Mine Explosion

Rescue Efforts Suspended at Mine as Death Toll Reaches 25
By IAN URBINA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07westvirginia.html?hp


MONTCOAL, W.Va. — The death toll from a blast at a West Virginia coal mine rose to 25 on Tuesday, federal safety officials said, making it the worst mining accident in the United States in 25 years.

Four miners were still missing, and the officials said it was likely that those men also had been killed in the explosion on Monday.

A recovery operation was called off early Tuesday morning because high levels of methane gas made the mine unsafe for rescuers. Workers were boring holes into the mine to try to get more oxygen inside, an effort that was not expected to be completed for several hours.

“The bodies will not be recovered until the mine is ventilated,” Ronald L. Wooten, the state’s mine health safety director, said at a news conference early Tuesday.

The accident was the worst in an American mine since Dec. 19, 1984, when 27 workers died in a fire at the Wilberg Mine in Orangeville, Utah, and it came just four years after federal regulators enacted a sweeping overhaul in mine safety laws. That overhaul, the first in over three decades, came after 19 miners died in a series of mine accidents in West Virginia and Kentucky — including one that brought criminal charges against a Massey subsidiary.

President Obama spoke about the accident at a White House prayer breakfast Tuesday morning.

“I spoke with Governor Manchin of West Virginia last night and told him that the federal government stands ready to offer whatever assistance is needed in this rescue effort,” President Obama said. “So I would ask for the faithful who are gathered here to pray for the safe return of the missing, the men and women who put their lives on the line to save them and the souls that have been lost in this tragic accident, may they rest in peace and may their families find comfort in the hard days ahead.”

The explosion occurred about 3 p.m. Monday at the Upper Big Branch mine, 30 miles south of Charleston, in Raleigh County.

The mine, which employs about 200, is owned by the Massey Energy Company, based in Virginia, and operated by the Performance Coal Company.

Mine safety officials said that there were three groups of miners affected by the blast. One group consisted of nine miners who were leaving the site at the end of their shift in a vehicle known as a “mantrip.” Seven of the miners in the man trip were killed by the explosion while two others were injured and taken to the hospital by rescue workers.

A second group of 18 miners was said to be working a bit deeper in the mine, closest to the area where coal was actually being extracted. All 18 of them died.

A third group of four miners — the ones still unaccounted for — was even deeper in the mine.

The miners were all thought to be working more than 1,000 feet underground.

The explosion on Monday destroyed all communication lines inside Upper Big Branch, but Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said there were two rescue chambers near the blast site. If the miners could reach them, the chambers were stocked with food, water and enough air to allow them to survive four days.

Mr. Stricklin said that officials did not think there had been a roof collapse, but that they did not know what had caused the explosion in the sprawling mine. Upper Big Branch, which cannot be seen from the road, has 19 openings and roughly seven-foot ceilings, federal safety officials said.

The interior is crisscrossed with railroad tracks used for hauling people and equipment. Outside are several plants where coal is prepared for shipment by train.

Emergency vehicles lined the two-lane road leading to the mine Monday night as families of the miners gathered at a building on the mine property. A church in nearby Whitesville opened its doors Monday night for a vigil.

“All we know now is, this is an awful disaster,” Representative Nick J. Rahall II said as he arrived at the mine site, which is in his district. “This is the second major disaster at a Massey site in recent years, and something needs to be done.”

In a statement, Massey’s chief executive officer, Don Blankenship, said mine rescue teams and state and federal officials were responding to the explosion. “We want to assure the families of all the miners we are taking every action possible to locate and rescue those still missing,” Mr. Blankenship said.

Phil Smith, a spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America, said that the mine was nonunion but that the union had dispatched a team to advise on the rescue and to help the families of the trapped or dead miners.

Michael Mayhorn, an emergency dispatcher for Boone County, said that at least 20 ambulances and three helicopters had been dispatched from nearby counties, and that the state medical examiner was heading to the scene. At least one miner was evacuated by helicopter, he said.

Dennis O’Dell, an official with the union who was in contact with state and federal safety officials, said the current theory was that the explosion might have been caused by a buildup of methane gas in a sealed-off section of the mine. A similar type of explosion occurred in the 2006 Sago mining disaster, which left 12 miners dead after trapping them underground for nearly two days.

Mr. O’Dell said some officials believed the ignition source for the explosion on Monday might have been a device that carries mine personnel to and from the work area.

For at least six of the past 10 years, federal records indicate, the Upper Big Branch mine has recorded an injury rate worse than the national average for similar operations. The records also show that the mine had 458 violations in 2009, with a total of $897,325 in safety penalties assessed against it last year. It has paid $168,393 in safety penalties.

“Massey’s commitment to safety has long been questioned in the coalfields,” said Tony Oppegard, a lawyer and mine safety advocate from Kentucky.

Those concerns were heightened in 2006 when an internal memo written by Mr. Blankenship became public. In the memo, Mr. Blankenship instructed the company’s underground mine superintendents to place coal production first.

“This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills,” he wrote.

Ellen Smith, the editor of Mine Safety and Health News, said the Upper Big Branch mine was the site of two fatalities in the previous 10 years.

Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, away on vacation in Florida, was returning to the state, said his spokesman Matt Turner. “This is devastating news,” Mr. Manchin said in a statement, “and our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the miners who have died. We are offering everything we can to assist those families.”

President Obama spoke with the governor about the accident and offered federal help.

More than 100,000 coal miners have been killed in accidents in the United States since 1900, but the number of fatalities has fallen sharply in recent decades, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. As late as the 1940s, it was not unusual to have more than 1,000 mining deaths a year; in 2009, there were 35 mining deaths, agency records show.

Mining remains dangerous work, as the disasters that seem to befall small Appalachian towns every few years attest. And there are persistent alarms raised about mines using antiquated safety equipment, lax enforcement and a culture that discourages safety complaints.

After the 2006 Sago mine accident, state officials said they believed those miners could have survived the blast in an abandoned section of the mine if the seals cordoning off the area where it occurred had been properly installed.

Federal regulations passed after the Sago disaster increased the monitoring of air quality in active and sealed sections of the mines to avoid methane build up. The new regulations also required mine operators to install stronger barriers between active and non-active sections of mines.

State officials said the mine was a long-wall mining operation, which is one of three major underground coal-mining methods. The method often uses a steel plow, or rotation drum, which is pulled mechanically back and forth across a face of coal that is usually several hundred feet long. The loosened coal falls onto a conveyor for removal from the mine.


Daniel Heyman contributed reporting from Montcoal, W.Va., and Derrick Henry and Michael Cooper contributed from New York.







Deaths at West Virginia Mine Raise Issues About Safety
By IAN URBINA and MICHAEL COOPER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07westvirginia.html?th&emc=th


MONTCOAL, W.Va. — Rescue workers began the precarious task Tuesday of removing explosive methane gas from the coal mine where at least 25 miners died the day before. The mine owner’s dismal safety record, along with several recent evacuations of the mine, left federal officials and miners suggesting that Monday’s explosion might have been preventable.

In the past two months, miners had been evacuated three times from the Upper Big Branch because of dangerously high methane levels, according to two miners who asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. Representative Nick J. Rahall II, a Democrat whose district includes the mine, said he had received similar reports from miners about recent evacuations at the mine, which as recently as last month was fined at least three times for ventilation problems, according to federal records.

The Massey Energy Company, the biggest coal mining business in central Appalachia and the owner of the Upper Big Branch mine, has drawn sharp scrutiny and fines from regulators over its safety and environmental record.

In 2008, one of its subsidiaries paid what federal prosecutors called the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry after pleading guilty to safety violations that contributed to the deaths of two miners in a fire in one of its mines. That year, Massey also paid a $20 million fine — the largest of its kind levied by the Environmental Protection Agency — for clean water violations.

It is still unclear what caused Monday’s blast, which is under investigation. But the disaster has raised new questions about Massey’s attention to safety under the leadership of its pugnacious chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, and about why stricter federal laws, put into effect after a mining disaster in 2006, failed to prevent another tragedy.

Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said the magnitude of the explosion — the worst mining accident in 25 years, which also left four people missing, including a woman working as a mining operator — showed that “something went very wrong here.”

“All explosions are preventable,” Mr. Stricklin said. “It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.”

Mr. Rahall said that even veteran rescue workers, some with decades of experience, had told him they were shocked by what they saw inside the mine. They said they had never witnessed destruction on that scale, Mr. Rahall said, or dealt with the aftermath of an explosion of that magnitude.

“It turned rail lines into pretzels,” Mr. Rahall said. “There seems like there was something awfully wrong to make such a huge explosion.”

Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and members of Congress said state and federal officials would begin investigating the explosion.

In an interview with the Metronews radio network in West Virginia, Mr. Blankenship said that despite the company’s many violations, the Mine Safety and Health Administration would never have allowed the mine to operate if it had been unsafe.

“Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” Mr. Blankenship said.

“There are violations at every coal mine in America, and U.B.B. was a mine that had violations,” he added, referring to Upper Big Branch.

“I think the fact that M.S.H.A., the state and our fire bosses and the best engineers that you can find were all in and around this mine, and all believed it to be safe in the circumstances it was in, speaks for itself as far as any suspicion that the mine was improperly operated,” Mr. Blankenship said.

The Massey Energy Web site also contains a defense of the company’s safety record. It says 2009 was the 17th year out of 20 that the company had scored above the industry average in safety.

But miners and other workers in the mine took issue with Mr. Blankenship’s reassurances.

“No one will say this who works at that mine, but everyone knows that it has been dangerous for years,” said Andrew Tyler, 22, an electrician who worked on the wiring for the coal conveyer belt as a subcontractor at the mine two years ago.

Mr. Tyler said workers had regularly been told to work 12-hour shifts when eight hours is the industry standard. He also said that live wires had been left exposed and that an accumulation of coal dust and methane was routinely ignored.

“I’m willing to go on record because I am a subcontractor who doesn’t depend on Massey for my life,” Mr. Tyler said.

In March alone, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the Upper Big Branch mine for 53 safety violations.

Last year, the number of citations issued against the mine more than doubled, to over 500, from 2008, and the penalties proposed against the mine more than tripled, to $897,325.

J. Davitt McAteer, a former assistant director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said the Massey company “is certainly one of the worst in the industry” when it came to safety and called recent violations at the mine for substandard ventilation and other problems “cardinal sins.”

“The Massey record is without doubt one of the most difficult in the industry from a safety standpoint,” Mr. McAteer, now the vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University, said in an interview. He said other large, diversified coal operators had far better safety records than Massey.

In 2008, the Aracoma Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey, agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal fines and civil penalties and to plead guilty to several safety violations related to a 2006 fire that killed two miners at a coal mine in Logan, W.Va.

After the fire broke out, the two miners found themselves unable to escape, partly because the company had removed some ventilation controls inside the mine. The workers died of suffocation. Federal prosecutors at the time called it the largest such settlement in the history of the coal industry.

The company’s commitment to safety came under scrutiny in 2005 after Mr. Blankenship sent a memorandum to his deep mine superintendents.

“If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal,” said the memo, a copy of which was obtained from Bruce E. Stanley, a lawyer who represented the widows of the victims of the Aracoma mine fire. “This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

In a follow-up memo a week later, Mr. Blankenship said some superintendents might have interpreted his first memo as implying that safety was a secondary consideration; in the second memo he called safety the company’s “first responsibility.”

In Washington on Tuesday during an Easter prayer breakfast, President Obama offered his condolences to the families of the victims and said the federal government was ready to help in whatever way needed.

Thirty-one miners were in the mine around 3 p.m. Monday when the explosion occurred. Some died from the explosion. Others suffocated from the fumes, state safety officials said. Seven of the bodies have been removed, and 14 have not yet been identified.

Four of the miners who were believed to have been farther back in the mine remained unaccounted for late Tuesday. Officials said there was still a possibility, though slim, that they had been able to reach airtight chambers, where there are stockpiles of food, water and oxygen.

Governor Manchin said at an afternoon news conference on Tuesday that four drills were in place to begin drilling holes behind the rescue chambers, an effort that began in earnest later in the day. It may not be until Wednesday night that rescue workers can regain entry to the mine after the first ventilation hole is drilled, he said.

“Everyone is going to cling on to the hope of that miracle,” the governor said of the four missing miners. “The odds are against us. These are long odds. They know. These are mining families. They know methane, they know about air.”

As the families of the miners waited on Tuesday, frustrations grew. State and mine officials were taking a long time to confirm the names of the dead, many of the miners said. Families also voiced frustration that they had learned about the disaster from news reports rather than from Massey officials.

Some of these tensions boiled over around 2 a.m. Tuesday when Mr. Blankenship arrived at the mine to announce the death toll to families who were gathered at the site. Escorted by at least a dozen state and other police officers, according to several witnesses, Mr. Blankenship prepared to address the crowd, but people yelled at him for caring more about profits than miners’ lives.

After another Massey official informed the crowd of the new death toll, one miner threw a chair. A father and son stormed off screaming that they were quitting mining work. And several people yelled at Mr. Blankenship that he was to blame before he was escorted from the scene.


Ian Urbina reported from Montcoal, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by Bernie Becker and Dan Heyman from Montcoal, and Dan Barry, Charles Duhigg, Liz Robbins and Stephanie Strom from New York.