Vol. 74/No. 27      July 19, 2010

Two more miners were recently killed on the job—one in West Virginia and another in Kentucky. The death toll for the first half of this year is 40, nine of them since the Massey Energy blast. Thirty-two have been in West Virginia. The death toll for all of 2009 was 34.

On July 1 a Massey Energy miner was run over by an underground shuttle car at White Buck Coal Co.’s Pocahontas Mine in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The 60 workers employed at this mine face dreadful safety conditions. Last year the mine’s accident rate was nearly twice the national average. In the past 12 months Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspectors cited the company for more than 260 violations, including 77 classified as “significant and substantial.”

Commenting on this recent fatality, U.S. labor secretary Hilda Solis urged the mine bosses to be more safety conscious. “We are committed to doing everything in our power to ensure that tragedies like this never happen again,” she stated, “but ultimately the responsibility for miner safety rests with the mine companies.”

On June 24 Bobby Smith, 29, an underground miner in eastern Kentucky, was crushed to death between the wall and a continuous mining machine. Smith had worked in the mines for 12 years. The accident occurred at James River Coal’s Leeco 68 mine located near Hazard, Kentucky.

Eight days earlier a section foreman was killed on the job after being hit by a falling steel beam. The death occurred at Lone Mountain Processing’s Clover Fork Mine No. 1 at Holmes Mill in southeastern Kentucky.

Retreat mining was taking place there, which involves cutting away pillars of coal that support overhead rock layers. According to MSHA and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, more than 50 miners have been killed in retreat mining operations over the past 25 years. Of those, 20 have died since 2000.

“It’s tremendously dangerous,” Tim Miller, an international representative for the United Mine Workers of America told Associated Press. “You have to be able to run really fast.”

Meanwhile, new facts about lax enforcement of safety regulations by MHSA inspectors have come to light. MSHA recently claimed that a “computer programming error” led it to not issue an enforcement warning letter to Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine prior to the April explosion.

Over the past 15 months MSHA dropped at least 10 coal mines from its “pattern of violation” (POV) list, reported the Department of Labor inspector general. Citing “resource limitations,” MSHA Coal Administrator Kevin Stricklin in March 2009 “directed his staff to only consider POV warnings for one mine per field office and no more than three mines per district office,” wrote Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr.
 
 
Related articles:
Ontario: Striking Steelworkers to vote on new pact with Vale  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home