Mines avoid crackdowns by challenging safety citations

[alp227]

By Kimberly Kindy, Steven Mufson and Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 10, 2010; A01

A surge in the number of challenges to mine safety citations has clogged a federal appeals process, allowing 32 coal mines to avoid tougher enforcement measures last year, government safety officials said Friday.

Five of those mines are owned by Massey Energy, which is contesting more federal safety fines than any other coal mining company in the nation, according to data and federal officials. By contesting the citations, the 32 mines were able to avoid falling into a "potential pattern of violation" category, which would have brought closer scrutiny and moved regulators a step closer to the ability to restrict or shut down operations.

In many cases, those mines would have been at greater risk of penalties if regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) later found even a single "significant and substantial" violation of safety standards. Massey's Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where at least 25 miners died in an explosion on Monday, had an unusually large number of those violations, including 54 in the past 12 months, a rate 11 times the national average.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/09/AR2010040905653_pf.html

Or you can just wait for the print edition of Saturday's Washington Post; this is a front-page article!

[Petrushka]

1. K & R --- Thank you for the link . . .

Incredible! I wonder how many more explosions and dead miners it might take to recognize a "pattern of violatiion"?