In the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, a huge cutting machine sheared coal from the long wall of a shaft more than 1,000 feet underground. The coal tumbled onto a conveyor belt, kicking up large amounts of dust.
This coal dust was a well-known hazard, not only to the lungs of the 31 miners who worked there. The dust was also an explosion risk because the powder – if it accumulated -- could be ignited by a spark from the cutting machine, and accelerated by methane gas that seeped from cracks in the walls.
The Massey Energy company had a fan system designed to deal with the methane problem. But the fans were not working right in the spring of 2010, and for some reason were spinning in reverse.
To prevent sparks, the company’s longwall mining machine had equipment to spray a steady stream of water onto the dust. But many of the nozzles were broken or missing.
Workers were assigned to drive two vehicles up and down the tunnels, spreading a layer of rock dust as a fireproof layer on top of the coal dust.
But, as University of Maryland Environmental Law Professor Rena Steinzor details in a new book, one of these rock dusting machines lay rusting in a broken heap outside the mine. The other’s engine was so old it frequently failed.
The two men who were supposed to work the rock dusting machines wrote desperately in their log books in March 2010: "Had no motor to run duster…. No motor again…. I’m set up to fail here."
Then it happened, just after 3 pm on April 5, 2010.
“Eventually, one afternoon, a spark flew – and a buildup of methane -- which is odorless and invisible, ignited,” Steinzor said. “The miners were not alerted that a buildup of methane had occurred. There was a spark from this shearing machine that was cutting the coal off the wall. And there was a massive explosion that killed 29 men. The explosion was gruesome. One of the men was not found for several days because his body was impaled on the ceiling of the mine, and when rescuers were walking through, they didn’t look up.”
These details are all from Steinzor’s book called “Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction,” published this month by Cambridge University Press. The book explores the failures of government regulators that led up to the Upper Big Branch explosion and several other industrial disasters. She scrutinizes the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the 2010, a deadly outbreak of salmonella poisoning from King Nut peanut butter in 2008, and the explosion of a BP oil refinery in Texas City in 2005, among other cases.
Steinzor found a pattern of deliberately underfunded and defanged government agencies that are supposed to be enforcing environmental and safety laws. Steinzor calls this problem “hollow government.”
“Hollow government means such severe funding gaps that an agency doesn’t have the capacity to make us safe,” Steinzor said. “Hollow government means an agency doesn’t have enough people to inspect and make sure that industrial facilities are complying with safety standards.”
All too often, Steinzor also found a lack of will by criminal prosecutors to investigate white collar crime. Prosecutors often have zero tolerance attitude toward street crime, but lots of tolerance for corporate executives who break safety and environmental laws.
In the 16 months leading up to the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration cited Massey Energy 835 times for violations of federal mine safety and health standards. Fifty-nine of these violations were so egregious they resulted in shutdown orders. But the mine kept operating.
“Sadly, it’s the regulatory agency that is revealed as very impotent here,” Steinzor said. “The reason that I wrote this book is that we are experiencing regulatory failure and dysfunction on a level that is very disturbing. And until we stop with the inane yammering that regulation is red tape, and kills jobs -- which encompasses regulations that save lives -- and until people stop dying in these hideous preventable accidents, we have to go the criminal route.”
In the case of the Upper Big Branch mine, Steinzor got her wish. On November 13, Federal Prosecutors indicted Massey Energy CEO Donald Blankenship on criminal charges of violating safety laws and lying to federal investigators.
Maybe a little jail time will clean up the corporate environment.
