With 29 miners dead at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, it’s time to notice what a long story lies behind this disaster. Last year the mine was cited for more than 500 safety violations, up 200 percent from 2008. In the weeks prior to the deaths, there had been 53 citations for failure to ventilate dust and methane and to map escape passages clearly.
But there’s more, and it goes beyond the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration to the highest levels of government. Everyone knew the Bush administration was cozy with the oil companies; the concessions they made to the coal companies were less well known. To say Big Coal got away with murder would be close to the truth.
In October of 2000 a coal slurry pit in Kentucky owned by a subsidiary of Massey Energy, the same company that owns Upper Big Branch, spilled into mine shafts below the ground and flooded towns downstream with 300 million gallons of grunge containing 60 toxic chemicals. No one was killed, but 17 municipal water supplies were poisoned and hundreds of people got sick. Just before Bush replaced Clinton as president, Jack Spadaro, an MSHA engineer and an expert on slurry spills, was one of a team ordered to investigate the spill.
But the Bush administration, Spadaro later told the environmental organization the Riverkeepers, was worried about the effect of the investigation on the coal industry, particularly since the nation’s mining heartland had (and has) other slurry pits that could flood areas downstream. (In 1972, such a flood, the Buffalo Creek disaster, killed 118 people and destroyed 551 homes).
Spadaro’s boss was fired the day Bush was inaugurated, and his replacement quickly terminated the investigation. Bush’s new Secretary of Labor, with administrative responsibility for the investigation, was Elaine Chao, the wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.), who often received donations from the coal industry; there have been lingering questions about her influence on the investigation. When it was closed, and Spadaro refused to sign a report that minimized the disaster, his office was raided and his papers rifled. Later he was demoted and reassigned to a different district office.
For 300 million gallons of slurry flooding more than 100 miles of land- and riverscape and poisoning 17 town water supplies, Massey paid a piddling $5,600 in fines. Around that time, Massey donated $100,000 to a Republican campaign committee spearheaded by McConnell. That the coddling of this company contributed to the loss of 29 lives this spring is appalling. It’s not, however, surprising.
