On May 11, 150 working and retired miners and family members from every union mine in Alabama picketed a meeting of Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and Jim Walter Resources officials, to voice their anger about lax compliance with mine safety laws by state mine operators and lax enforcement by MSHA.

The meeting, at a restaurant in Hueytown, Alabama, was sponsored by the Holmes Safety Association. This is an organization started in 1916 that claims to promote cooperation by company, government, and labor groups to prevent mine fatalities and promote safety. The first mine safety laws with any real teeth, however, were not written until the 1970s in face of mass mobilizations by miners and strikes. The featured speaker at the dinner was MSHA Administrator Ray McKinney, a top agency official.

A month later, on June 16, Kenneth Battles was killed at the same mine. He is the 12th coal miner to be killed on the job this year. He was killed when he was crushed by a coal car in an underground coal bunker that he was hosing out. According to MSHA, the bunker operator was unaware of his location. As the coal bosses have cut the number of workers, it has become common for miners to work by themselves cleaning spilled coal along belt haulage areas.

The same day Battles was killed, Edwin Pennington, a 25-year-old miner, died when the mine roof fell on him in a Bell County Coal Corporation mine in Perry County, Kentucky, where he worked for an independent contractor. A few hours later, Eric Chaney, 26, lost his life in another roof collapse in a Dags Branch Coal Corporation mine in Pike County, Kentucky.

“Our Alabama miners have suffered through the tragic September 2001 explosions at JWR No. 5 that killed 13 UMWA miners, and now these latest deaths,” said UMWA president Cecil Roberts in a press statement. “They have a lot of questions, and MSHA needs to start providing some real answers, not just lip service. This latest trend must be reversed—sooner, not later.”

Investigations by the UMWA and MSHA found that the company had been grossly negligent, failing to carry out basic safety measures that could have prevented the buildup of explosive quantities of methane gas and coal dust that caused the September 2001 explosion. The union also faulted MSHA for lax enforcement of mine safety laws.

MSHA has not released a report on its investigation of Keeton’s death or of the five other miners killed since then.

Clay Dennison is a member of UMWA Local 2133.  
 
 
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