April 9, 2011

NPR’s Howard Berkes has written a series of articles summarizing what’s known about the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine one year after the tragedy.

Read articles:

• Questions Remain Year After W.Va. Mine Explosion Even though a year has already passed, much is still unknown about the UBB tragedy. To start with, how was such a tragedy possible under modern mining rules and regulations? “I’ve been in MSHA for 31 years and I’ve never seen 29 fatalities,” says Kevin Stricklin, administrator for coal mine safety and health at the Mine Safety and Health Administration. “This takes us back to the ’60s or ’70s, this explosion.” The article further explores Massey’s claim that the explosion was a natural disaster, their emphasis on maximizing production and its increased pressure on miners, and their claim that safety and efficiency carry equal importance.
• After W. Va. Mine Blast, Confusion Impeded Search and Emergency Reports Detail Slow Mine Blast Response offer detailed analysis of logs of radio traffic, 911 calls, records kept by Massey, starting with the first call to emergency officials a full 25 minutes after the explosion to the West Virginia’s Mine Industrial Rapid Response. The safety director of the mine starts the call with a calm “I want to report an emergency,” reports an “an air reversal on the beltline and CO [carbon monoxide] 50 to 100 parts per million,” and when asked if there are any injuries, he says “No. The mine is being evacuated at this time.”
• Hour By Hour: Emergency Response to the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster A detailed interactive timeline showing the events associated with the tragedy starting with the explosion at 3:02pm on April 5, 2010 and continuing through April 13, 2010 when the last nine bodies are removed from the mine and it was sealed for investigation. The timeline was reconstructed from more than 20 hours of recorded emergency radio traffic, printed 911 logs and notes from the mine itself.
• Coal Mining’s Perils And Politics: A Massey Energy Timeline This interactive timeline shows major incidents involving Massey Coal over the last decade starting with a 200M gallon coal sludge spill in October 2000 and continuing through the Marsh Fork Elementary School trial that Massey won in March 2011.

April 8, 2011

When the new reality television series ‘Coal’ opened on Spike TV, the Mining Safety and Health Administration was watching too. Unfortunately what they saw landed Cobalt Coal Company with several citations for unsafe conduct. In the first case, a worker was photographed using a 12 inch pick hammer to try and pull down loose rock from the ceiling causing a dramatic collapse; workers should have used a different tool. A second violation was given from video footage showing miners moving the longwall machine when the machine was off and while another miner was in a position where he could have been pinned during the move.

MSHA said that this is the first time that they have issued a citation based on a video documentary. “However, this is the first time that a document like this has been taped underground, to our knowledge” said MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere. “If violations are obvious, they will be cited.” Cobalt CEO Mike Crowder preferred to look at the positive side of things by pointing out that the high quality footage from ‘Coal’ will provide much better training videos than the standard low-quality and boring videos normally used to train miners on safety rules.

Read article at http://billingsgazette.com/entertainment/tv/article_36c9fba9-239d-519f-8916-a7caa7d3a962.html

April 8, 2011

West Virginia researchers have discovered that coal miners working in mines with legal amounts of coal dust are still contracting and dying from black lung disease. The new study, to be published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Chest concludes
Contemporary occupational dust exposures have resulted over the last decade in rapidly progressive pneumoconiosis and massive fibrosis in relatively young West Virginia coal miners, leading to important lung dysfunction and premature death.

These results are in marked contrast to comments recently by Senator Rand Paul (KY-R) claiming that no new coal dust regulations are necessary because the mining industry does a pretty good job of stopping black lung disease all by itself. In fact the data show that the rates of black lung decreased steadily from 1969 to 1999, but has been on the rise since.

Read news summary by Ken Ward, Jr. at http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2011/04/08/new-study-adds-to-evidence-about-the-need-for-tougher-rules-to-end-black-lung-disease/ and the Chest article itself at http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/content/early/2010/09/28/chest.10-1326.abstract

April 7, 2011

In March, Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle Mine shipped more than 10 million tons of coal in 641 trains of coal, approximately 1% of national production. In doing so, North Antelope set a record for the most coal shipped in a month; at the same time it shipped more in a month than the 2009 production of all but 15 mines in the country. It was the third time in the last year the mine set a new monthly record.

Peabody attributed the record to many different increases in efficiency, but most of all was the different mechanisms for loading the coal onto trains. Crusher output was increase, new loaders were able to load trains from multiple silos at the same time, and side tracks on site can hold up to ten idling trains. “Trains don’t sit on the [mainline] tracks like they used to,” said Andy Cebula, a railroad expert who helped develop a 2006 rail capacity study. “Everything is working really smoothly right now.”

Read article at http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/Coal/8761593

April 6, 2011

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has released their preliminary report into an accident at Signal Peak’s Bull Mountains Mine Number 1 on March 24, 2011 that cost a miner his foot. The report says that Jamison Ward, age 28, was working on freeing a stuck chain on the conveyor belt whose job was to move coal away from the continuous mining machine at the coal face. Mr. Ward had 32 weeks of experience at his job before the accident.

The full text of the preliminary report:

On March 24, 2011 at approximately 6:10am, the victim, a maintenance foreman, was involved in a machinery accident while the victim and other miners were attempting to free the longwall face conveyor on the 1st Right Longwall section. The crew was attempting to job the conveyor free and had opened up an access panel on the headgate and near the stageloader where the victim was located. The miner’s right foot became entangled in the return side (lower) of the face-conveyor chain at the moment tension was appleid to the chain. The chain moved a minimum of 15 feet, 3 inches. The miner’s foot was severed about 2 inches above the ankle. The miner also received a compound fracture to his left leg (tibia/fibula area). No other injuries were reported. MSHA is investigating this accident.

Read article at http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/article_30aa1b2d-dca5-5caf-9c74-3a66d4471208.html

April 6, 2011

“Wyoming really does live and die by coal.” A cemetery in Gillette, WY in the heart of the Powder River Basin has uncovered a problem. A large low-grade coal seam lies just below the surface of 20% of the surface. Since it is far harder to dig through coal than to dig through dirt, this means that nothing can be buried there unless the coal is removed first.

Estimates at the cost of removing the coal seam are $3.4M.

Read article at http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/article_53ccdb2a-6042-11e0-bfbf-001cc4c03286.html

April 5, 2011

Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit to challenge coal sales in the Powder River Basin. The suit claims that the PRB, the largest coal producing region in the United States producing more than 40% of the coal burnt in the US, was incorrectly de-certified as a coal producing region in 1990. Plaintiffs claim that by de-certifying the region the government has managed to avoid doing proper environmental assessments of the impacts of mining the coal, concentrating on the effects of individual mines in isolation instead of the effect of the entire region. Additionally, the current method of selling coal leases, known as “lease by application” would not be allowable.

The lawsuit follows the rejection of an administrative petition to the Department of the Interior to recertify the region. Marion Loomis with the Wyoming Mining Association defended the federal coal program as providing a “logical process” that includes a review of environmental impacts from individual mines, although not their cumulative pollution.

Read article at http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/article_002091da-5fa5-11e0-a200-001cc4c002e0.html

April 5, 2011

Special Investigator Davitt McAteer, appointed by the state of West Virginia to conduct an independent investigation of the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine has found a lot of blame to go around, saying Massey Energy, and state and national investigators and regulators all should share the blame for the disaster. “You have these checks and balances in company safety reviews, MSHA enforcement, state enforcement. They are there to be sure that people don’t forget. You have not just a singular failure, but multiple failures of the entire system.”

But asked about what has happened since, McAteer’s assessment was no less pessimistic: “There hasn’t been any change, either on a statewide basis in West Virginia or in the nation. The lack of action can be traced to two items: The investigations into the disaster have not been completed . . . and Upper Big Branch was replaced by the [BP Deepwater Horizon] oil spill. The legislative agenda moves from one topic to another topic, and the first topic receives less attention. At the moment, we do not have any impetus to get a legislative package through Congress.”

Read articles at http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2011/04/05/mcateer-no-change-since-massey-disaster/ and http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/3116/

Read article at http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2011/04/05/mcateer-no-change-since-massey-disaster/

April 4, 2011

One year after the blast at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, multiple probes are still moving forward to uncover what really happened. Their results so far are hardly consistent with an independent investigator preparing to release his results, federal inspectors mostly staying quiet, and Massey claiming the accident was beyond their control. Davitt McAteer, a former head of MSHA who was hired by the state of West Virginia to independently look in to the disaster, seems to be blaming everyone, citing oversights by Massey, state and federal investigators.

Massey idled production at its 60 mines to commemorate the disaster, but at the same time company officials explained that their scientists had determined that the explosion was due to a sudden surge of natural gas “that was unexpected, intense and overwhelmed the normal safety systems” and thus should properly be labeled a “natural disaster.”

Read article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704587004576243171981966648.html

April 3, 2011

Gar Quarles is a coal miner with 34 years experience. A year ago his son was one of the 29 fatalities in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. He still pores over maps of the mine, attends hearings at MSHA about the explosion, contacts experts in longwall mining, all in the hopes of understanding what happened to his son and why. And he still hasn’t returned to work underground.

Read article at http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Year-after-W-Va-mine-blast-family-can-t-move-on-1320471.php