This Tuesday will mark the one-year anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in southern West Virginia. The explosion, which ripped through a Massey-owned coal mine in one of the poorest regions of the country, took the lives of 29 miners, making it the worst coal mine disaster in the U.S. in four decades.
As predictable as it is tragic, no one has been held accountable. After a year of investigating, charges have been filed against one relatively low-level employee, UBB’s security chief Hughie Elbert Stover, for obstructing justice and making false statements. Former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, as well as the company’s board of directors, remains untouched.
Last December, more than 18 high-level officials for the energy giant refused to speak to investigators looking into the disaster. When Blankenship retired late last year, he escaped unscathed with a golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars.
It has become clear nothing has changed. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration began conducting special “impact inspections” after the UBB disaster to target mines with a poor history of compliance.
Last week, the agency announced during February, 166 citations were issued. Just two Massey-owned mines accounted for more than half the violations. At three other Massey operations, more than 60 percent of the violations were considered serious.
The political establishment continues to ensure the industry remains largely unregulated by keeping agencies grossly underfunded for their task.
The regulatory framework leaves loopholes, which allow the worse mines to escape enforcement. It also provides a legal swamp into which those fines and citations, which happen to be issued, can be deferred indefinitely through endless contest and appeal until such time as a sufficiently sympathetic judge can be found to quietly render them meaningless.
But this is only half the story. There is also an unwillingness to close down dangerous mines on the part of the regulatory agencies. NPR noted last week “it wasn’t until November, 2010, that the Labor Department hauled a mine operator into federal court in response to serious and persistent safety violations” despite having “had that authority … for 33 years.”
According to MSHA, the UBB had an “extensive record of serious safety and health violations.”
However, MSHA records show from 2008 to April 2010 the mine was issued more than 800 citations and orders, of which only two dozen carried fines of more than $10,000 with the average penalty being around $1,800.
Like all big business, the coal industry has found a friend in President Obama.
The Charleston Gazette reports since Obama took office, “MSHA’s assessment of flagrant penalties appears to have dropped off significantly, from 70 such assessments in 2008 to 19 each year in 2009 and 2010.” This year has seen only three such violations so far.
The story of the UBB disaster has become the rule in America and not the exception.
The past three years have witnessed both the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression and the worse ecological disaster in American history. The former destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans, throwing millions out of work and home. The latter killed 11 men when the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded, spilling an estimated 4.9 million barrels – or 206 million gallons – of oil over nearly three months time.
Again, absolutely no one has been held accountable.
America is a country where police routinely confiscate the property and petty gains of drug dealers and crooks, yet refuses to violate the sanctified property-rights of reckless energy giants or seize the obscene levels of ill-gotten wealth of financial speculators as these interests endanger the lives and welfare of millions.
The troubled inner-city youth who shoots a store clerk in a robbery is barbarically executed in the name of justice, while the mass murders of big business are rewarded with multi-million-dollar bonuses.
Tuesday can be expected to bring a profuse outpouring of crocodile tears from the media as well as political posturing on the part of elected officials. This will be coupled with patronizing tributes to the “miners’ way of life” and phony indignation at the lack of answers so far. The miners won’t be fooled by this circus so neither should the reader.
