Friday, July 01, 2011 3:51:40 AM
Mine Owners Misled Inspectors, Investigators Say
A candlelight vigil in April 2010 for miners killed at a West Virginia mine. Investigators say the company took systematic and premeditated steps to circumvent government inspections.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: June 29, 2011
Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.
Kevin Stricklin, administrator for coal at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, described a dual accounting system practiced by Massey before the deadly explosion, in which safety problems and efforts to fix them were recorded in an internal set of books, out of sight of state inspectors, and off the official books that the law required them to keep.
That was among the conclusions of a large team of federal investigators, who spent a year sifting through more than 84,000 pages of documents, interviewing 266 people and examining evidence at the Upper Big Branch mine, where the explosion occurred.
Some of the findings echoed a report issued by an independent team of state investigators this month, which blamed Massey and a culture of impunity for the explosion. But these findings went further, saying that Massey took systematic and premeditated steps to circumvent government inspections.
“If a coal mine wants to keep two sets of books, that’s their own business,” Mr. Stricklin said. “What they have to do is record the hazards associated with the examination in the official record book, and that wasn’t the case here.”
Ted Pile, a spokesman for Alpha Natural Resources, the company that acquired Massey in a merger this month, said that company officials had heard the information for the first time on Wednesday “along with the rest of the public,” and that until the company completed its own investigation it would not be in a position to comment.
In a presentation in Beaver, W. Va., Mr. Stricklin offered a stinging indictment of Massey practices, saying the federal investigation by more than 100 people had been able to rule out the company’s assertion that the explosion on April 5, 2010, happened because of an event beyond its control: a huge inundation of gas.
His findings matched those of the earlier report, conducted by a former federal mine safety chief, Davitt McAteer, which said that coal dust had been allowed to accumulate, spreading what had been a small ignition of methane through the mine and creating the deadliest mine blast in 40 years. “We are further along than this just being our theory,” Mr. Stricklin said. “This is our conclusion.”
It is not unusual for a mine to keep several sets of books to track things like production and safety examinations before and during shifts. But it is against the rules to note problems with safety only on internal books, which are not required to be shown to federal or state inspectors, and leave them off the official books, which are required.
And while mines sometimes resort to shortcuts, noting that all is well when something needs to be fixed, doing so could result in criminal charges, because falsifying records is a felony under federal mining laws, said Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky-based lawyer who specializes in coal industry cases.
Mr. Stricklin could not say whether his findings, which will be issued in the form of a formal report this fall, would lead to criminal charges.
Two people have already been indicted in the case this spring, according to Melvin Smith, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of West Virginia: a foreman, accused of lying on a document and to federal officials, and the former chief of security, accused of lying and concealing documents.
Massey managers, including the former chief executive, Don Blankenship, have not been charged, including 18 executives who refused to be interviewed for the federal investigation, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights.
Mr. Stricklin acknowledged that the mining authority knew about the conditions at the mine — in the year before the blast, the mine received more orders to shut down unsafe areas than any other coal mine in the country — and had stopped short of applying the toughest measure of closing it.
But he said officials had not known the detail that surfaced in the so-called production reports, or internal set of record keeping, that officials were given as part of the federal investigation after the explosion. Inspectors had no way of going into the “locked closets” of the company to read these, he said. The blast forced them into public view.
Mr. Stricklin showed scanned copies of pages from the reports side by side in his presentation on Wednesday. The internal report from March 1, 2010, shortly before the accident, noted a problem with water sprayers, while the official report stated flatly “none observed” in the column for hazardous conditions.
Massey managers appeared to have pressured workers to omit dangerous conditions from the official books, Mr. Stricklin said, a finding that echoed Mr. McAteer’s conclusion that workers who tried to report risks were intimidated.
One fact seemed to buttress that conclusion: In the years leading up to the explosion, the federal mining watchdog received just one phone call on its anonymous safety hot line from a worker in the mine.
*
Document: Report on the Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/20/us/20110520_MINE_REPORT_DOC.html
Interactive Feature: Lost at Upper Big Branch
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/23/us/20100423_MINE_VICTIMS.html
*
Related
2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely (April 23, 2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/us/23mine.html
*
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30mine.html
===
Massey Faked Reports Ahead of 2010 Fatal Mine Blast, U.S. Says
By Holly Rosenkrantz - Jun 29, 2011 12:39 PM CT
Massey Energy Co. (MEE) managers pressured coal miners to fabricate safety reports to mislead inspectors before the 2010 West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 people, federal investigators said.
Kevin Stricklin, the assistant administrator of coal at the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, said his agency’s investigation of the April 2010 blast found duplicate books on daily mine operations. On several occasions in the months before the blast, the books didn’t match, he said. One set told inspectors there were no serious issues while internal reports revealed many hazards, he said.
“Managers were aware that chronic hazardous conditions were not recorded,” Stricklin said at a briefing for families of victims who died in the explosion, which was the worst U.S. mining disaster in 40 years. “Management pressured examiners to not record hazards in the books.”
Massey agreed in January to be acquired by Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANR) for $7.1 billion. Ted Pile, an Alpha spokesman, said the company would look at the agency’s conclusion as part of a separate probe of the fatal blast.
“We heard this information for the first time from MSHA at the same time everyone else did,” Pile said in an e-mail.
Stricklin said Massey managers had to countersign books at the Upper Big Branch mine and knew that the hazards, from low air flow to high levels of explosive gas, went unreported.
A West Virginia investigator said in a report last month that Massey is to blame for the fatal explosion at the mine. An investigation by Massey concluded that the explosion was beyond its control, and was a naturally occurring event caused by an inundation of natural gas.
MSHA plans to complete its own investigation this fall.
“This explosion could and should have been prevented by the mine operator,” Stricklin said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Washington at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
©2011 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-29/massey-faked-reports-ahead-of-2010-fatal-mine-blast-u-s-says.html
===
UBB disaster: Prosecution needed
Editorial
June 30, 2011
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Still more evidence implies that 29 West Virginia miners were killed because of deliberate safety law violations at Massey's Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County over a year ago.
Mine operators "cooked the books," listing safety hazards in private company reports but omitting them from official records seen by federal inspectors, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration leaders said Wednesday near Beckley. The deceitful records were countersigned by "upper management" in addition to local supervisors.
Also, Massey intimidated foremen to maximize production at the expense of safety, MSHA indicated. One was fired because he delayed coal output to fix ventilation problems.
Also, dangerous levels of explosive coal dust were allowed to accumulate in the mine, not cleaned up or covered with rock dust to suppress the risk of detonation, as required by law, MSHA reported. (The fact that autopsies found a disturbing three-fourths of the UBB victims had black lung disease implies the presence of too much coal dust.)
Also, water sprays designed to prevent sparks were missing, faulty, clogged or otherwise inoperable.
Also, ventilating systems designed to suck lethal methane out of working sections were botched, half-working. On the day of the explosion, they were flowing backward.
These ugly revelations increase the prospect that significant criminal prosecutions may arise from several ongoing investigations into the 2010 tragedy, the worst U.S. mine disaster in 40 years.
Since the deadly blast, Massey has insisted that an unpreventable act of God -- a sudden inflow of explosive methane gas -- was to blame. But two governmental probes reject that theory.
First a special state investigation, and now the federal MSHA findings, say there's no evidence of excess methane. Instead, it seems likely that a coal-cutting machine hit rock, causing a spark that wasn't squelched by sprays, which produced a small methane blast -- then the jolt caused uncovered coal dust to swirl up into a mammoth explosion.
After MSHA's Wednesday disclosures, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said concealment of hazard reports "confirms that management knew there were serious problems at the mine, yet chose to hide them from safety officials and the miners themselves."
Over the years, the Massey mine racked up a monstrous record of safety violations. It's hard to understand why federal and state inspectors didn't shut down the pit, long before the fatal day.
So far, only two low-ranking UBB employees have been charged with criminal violations. As ominous evidence keeps growing, it's hard to believe that the scope of prosecutions won't increase. Justice seems to require it.
© Copyright 2011 The Charleston Gazette
http://wvgazette.com/Opinion/Editorials/201106300992 [no comments yet]
===
Lies and Truth About Upper Big Branch
Editorial
Published: June 30, 2011
Profits trumped all, including the safety and lives of 29 miners. That is the clear conclusion [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30mine.html (first above)] of a yearlong federal investigation into the Upper Big Branch disaster. Industry must finally learn its lesson. Congress and federal regulators must ensure that it does.
The investigation [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/20/us/20110520_MINE_REPORT_DOC.html ] by the Mine Safety and Health Administration [ http://www.msha.gov/ ] faults the mine’s owner, Massey Energy, for deadly mismanagement. “This explosion could and should have been prevented by the mine operator,” it said, rejecting the company’s claim that a sudden infusion of methane gas caused the explosion.
Investigators instead found a chain of safety neglect: a dangerous buildup of coal dust had gone unattended and finally exploded after faulty water sprays failed to douse sparks from a cutting machine.
It also found that mine executives kept two sets of safety books to hide lethal hazards from inspectors, while also intimidating foremen and safety monitors into misrepresenting the true dangers down below.
The findings are being referred to criminal prosecutors. The mine’s security chief has already been indicted, and more than a dozen company officials are under investigation and, thus far, declining to cooperate.
Senator John Rockefeller IV, a Democrat of West Virginia, is sponsoring legislation urgently needed to prevent further disasters. It would strengthen the mine safety agency with subpoena power against routinely evasive owners, impose tough civil and criminal penalties for violators and provide protections for whistle-blowers who come forward with the harsh truth.
Republicans, ever eager to do the bidding of Big Coal, have been ducking reform with calls for further study. What more is needed than these findings of management by greed and double bookkeeping?
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01fri3.html
===
from earlier this string, in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63424087
A candlelight vigil in April 2010 for miners killed at a West Virginia mine. Investigators say the company took systematic and premeditated steps to circumvent government inspections.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: June 29, 2011
Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.
Kevin Stricklin, administrator for coal at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, described a dual accounting system practiced by Massey before the deadly explosion, in which safety problems and efforts to fix them were recorded in an internal set of books, out of sight of state inspectors, and off the official books that the law required them to keep.
That was among the conclusions of a large team of federal investigators, who spent a year sifting through more than 84,000 pages of documents, interviewing 266 people and examining evidence at the Upper Big Branch mine, where the explosion occurred.
Some of the findings echoed a report issued by an independent team of state investigators this month, which blamed Massey and a culture of impunity for the explosion. But these findings went further, saying that Massey took systematic and premeditated steps to circumvent government inspections.
“If a coal mine wants to keep two sets of books, that’s their own business,” Mr. Stricklin said. “What they have to do is record the hazards associated with the examination in the official record book, and that wasn’t the case here.”
Ted Pile, a spokesman for Alpha Natural Resources, the company that acquired Massey in a merger this month, said that company officials had heard the information for the first time on Wednesday “along with the rest of the public,” and that until the company completed its own investigation it would not be in a position to comment.
In a presentation in Beaver, W. Va., Mr. Stricklin offered a stinging indictment of Massey practices, saying the federal investigation by more than 100 people had been able to rule out the company’s assertion that the explosion on April 5, 2010, happened because of an event beyond its control: a huge inundation of gas.
His findings matched those of the earlier report, conducted by a former federal mine safety chief, Davitt McAteer, which said that coal dust had been allowed to accumulate, spreading what had been a small ignition of methane through the mine and creating the deadliest mine blast in 40 years. “We are further along than this just being our theory,” Mr. Stricklin said. “This is our conclusion.”
It is not unusual for a mine to keep several sets of books to track things like production and safety examinations before and during shifts. But it is against the rules to note problems with safety only on internal books, which are not required to be shown to federal or state inspectors, and leave them off the official books, which are required.
And while mines sometimes resort to shortcuts, noting that all is well when something needs to be fixed, doing so could result in criminal charges, because falsifying records is a felony under federal mining laws, said Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky-based lawyer who specializes in coal industry cases.
Mr. Stricklin could not say whether his findings, which will be issued in the form of a formal report this fall, would lead to criminal charges.
Two people have already been indicted in the case this spring, according to Melvin Smith, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of West Virginia: a foreman, accused of lying on a document and to federal officials, and the former chief of security, accused of lying and concealing documents.
Massey managers, including the former chief executive, Don Blankenship, have not been charged, including 18 executives who refused to be interviewed for the federal investigation, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights.
Mr. Stricklin acknowledged that the mining authority knew about the conditions at the mine — in the year before the blast, the mine received more orders to shut down unsafe areas than any other coal mine in the country — and had stopped short of applying the toughest measure of closing it.
But he said officials had not known the detail that surfaced in the so-called production reports, or internal set of record keeping, that officials were given as part of the federal investigation after the explosion. Inspectors had no way of going into the “locked closets” of the company to read these, he said. The blast forced them into public view.
Mr. Stricklin showed scanned copies of pages from the reports side by side in his presentation on Wednesday. The internal report from March 1, 2010, shortly before the accident, noted a problem with water sprayers, while the official report stated flatly “none observed” in the column for hazardous conditions.
Massey managers appeared to have pressured workers to omit dangerous conditions from the official books, Mr. Stricklin said, a finding that echoed Mr. McAteer’s conclusion that workers who tried to report risks were intimidated.
One fact seemed to buttress that conclusion: In the years leading up to the explosion, the federal mining watchdog received just one phone call on its anonymous safety hot line from a worker in the mine.
*
Document: Report on the Upper Big Branch Mine Explosion
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/20/us/20110520_MINE_REPORT_DOC.html
Interactive Feature: Lost at Upper Big Branch
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/23/us/20100423_MINE_VICTIMS.html
*
Related
2 Mines Show How Safety Practices Vary Widely (April 23, 2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/us/23mine.html
*
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30mine.html
===
Massey Faked Reports Ahead of 2010 Fatal Mine Blast, U.S. Says
By Holly Rosenkrantz - Jun 29, 2011 12:39 PM CT
Massey Energy Co. (MEE) managers pressured coal miners to fabricate safety reports to mislead inspectors before the 2010 West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 people, federal investigators said.
Kevin Stricklin, the assistant administrator of coal at the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, said his agency’s investigation of the April 2010 blast found duplicate books on daily mine operations. On several occasions in the months before the blast, the books didn’t match, he said. One set told inspectors there were no serious issues while internal reports revealed many hazards, he said.
“Managers were aware that chronic hazardous conditions were not recorded,” Stricklin said at a briefing for families of victims who died in the explosion, which was the worst U.S. mining disaster in 40 years. “Management pressured examiners to not record hazards in the books.”
Massey agreed in January to be acquired by Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANR) for $7.1 billion. Ted Pile, an Alpha spokesman, said the company would look at the agency’s conclusion as part of a separate probe of the fatal blast.
“We heard this information for the first time from MSHA at the same time everyone else did,” Pile said in an e-mail.
Stricklin said Massey managers had to countersign books at the Upper Big Branch mine and knew that the hazards, from low air flow to high levels of explosive gas, went unreported.
A West Virginia investigator said in a report last month that Massey is to blame for the fatal explosion at the mine. An investigation by Massey concluded that the explosion was beyond its control, and was a naturally occurring event caused by an inundation of natural gas.
MSHA plans to complete its own investigation this fall.
“This explosion could and should have been prevented by the mine operator,” Stricklin said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Washington at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
©2011 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-29/massey-faked-reports-ahead-of-2010-fatal-mine-blast-u-s-says.html
===
UBB disaster: Prosecution needed
Editorial
June 30, 2011
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Still more evidence implies that 29 West Virginia miners were killed because of deliberate safety law violations at Massey's Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County over a year ago.
Mine operators "cooked the books," listing safety hazards in private company reports but omitting them from official records seen by federal inspectors, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration leaders said Wednesday near Beckley. The deceitful records were countersigned by "upper management" in addition to local supervisors.
Also, Massey intimidated foremen to maximize production at the expense of safety, MSHA indicated. One was fired because he delayed coal output to fix ventilation problems.
Also, dangerous levels of explosive coal dust were allowed to accumulate in the mine, not cleaned up or covered with rock dust to suppress the risk of detonation, as required by law, MSHA reported. (The fact that autopsies found a disturbing three-fourths of the UBB victims had black lung disease implies the presence of too much coal dust.)
Also, water sprays designed to prevent sparks were missing, faulty, clogged or otherwise inoperable.
Also, ventilating systems designed to suck lethal methane out of working sections were botched, half-working. On the day of the explosion, they were flowing backward.
These ugly revelations increase the prospect that significant criminal prosecutions may arise from several ongoing investigations into the 2010 tragedy, the worst U.S. mine disaster in 40 years.
Since the deadly blast, Massey has insisted that an unpreventable act of God -- a sudden inflow of explosive methane gas -- was to blame. But two governmental probes reject that theory.
First a special state investigation, and now the federal MSHA findings, say there's no evidence of excess methane. Instead, it seems likely that a coal-cutting machine hit rock, causing a spark that wasn't squelched by sprays, which produced a small methane blast -- then the jolt caused uncovered coal dust to swirl up into a mammoth explosion.
After MSHA's Wednesday disclosures, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said concealment of hazard reports "confirms that management knew there were serious problems at the mine, yet chose to hide them from safety officials and the miners themselves."
Over the years, the Massey mine racked up a monstrous record of safety violations. It's hard to understand why federal and state inspectors didn't shut down the pit, long before the fatal day.
So far, only two low-ranking UBB employees have been charged with criminal violations. As ominous evidence keeps growing, it's hard to believe that the scope of prosecutions won't increase. Justice seems to require it.
© Copyright 2011 The Charleston Gazette
http://wvgazette.com/Opinion/Editorials/201106300992 [no comments yet]
===
Lies and Truth About Upper Big Branch
Editorial
Published: June 30, 2011
Profits trumped all, including the safety and lives of 29 miners. That is the clear conclusion [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30mine.html (first above)] of a yearlong federal investigation into the Upper Big Branch disaster. Industry must finally learn its lesson. Congress and federal regulators must ensure that it does.
The investigation [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/20/us/20110520_MINE_REPORT_DOC.html ] by the Mine Safety and Health Administration [ http://www.msha.gov/ ] faults the mine’s owner, Massey Energy, for deadly mismanagement. “This explosion could and should have been prevented by the mine operator,” it said, rejecting the company’s claim that a sudden infusion of methane gas caused the explosion.
Investigators instead found a chain of safety neglect: a dangerous buildup of coal dust had gone unattended and finally exploded after faulty water sprays failed to douse sparks from a cutting machine.
It also found that mine executives kept two sets of safety books to hide lethal hazards from inspectors, while also intimidating foremen and safety monitors into misrepresenting the true dangers down below.
The findings are being referred to criminal prosecutors. The mine’s security chief has already been indicted, and more than a dozen company officials are under investigation and, thus far, declining to cooperate.
Senator John Rockefeller IV, a Democrat of West Virginia, is sponsoring legislation urgently needed to prevent further disasters. It would strengthen the mine safety agency with subpoena power against routinely evasive owners, impose tough civil and criminal penalties for violators and provide protections for whistle-blowers who come forward with the harsh truth.
Republicans, ever eager to do the bidding of Big Coal, have been ducking reform with calls for further study. What more is needed than these findings of management by greed and double bookkeeping?
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01fri3.html
===
from earlier this string, in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63424087
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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