Whose Responsible for the 12 Dead Miners in West Virginia?
If mines can't be trusted to operate themselves safely, I'm almost
suspicious that major pollutors won't voluntarily cut emissions!
"We're all in the mine shaft now." And the canary's quit singing...
Since
the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient
than its predecessors toward mining companies facing serious safety
violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting
less than half of the money that violators owed, a Knight Ridder
investigation has found.
At one point last year, the Mine Safety
and Health Administration fined a coal company $440 for a "significant
and substantial" violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man.
The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns
the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died last week.
The $440 fine remains unpaid.
Relaxed
mine-safety enforcement is widespread, according to a Knight Ridder
analysis of federal records and interviews with former and current
federal safety officials, while deaths and injuries from mining
accidents have hovered near record-low levels in the last few years. Knight Ridder is the parent company of The Inquirer.
The analysis shows:
The
number of major fines over $10,000 has dropped by nearly 10 percent
since 2001. The dollar amount of those penalties, when adjusted for
inflation, has plummeted 43 percent to a median of $27,584.
Fewer than half of the fines levied between 2001 and 2003 - about $3 million - have been paid.
The
budget and staff for the enforcement office also have declined, forcing
the agency to make do with about 100 fewer coal-mine-enforcement
personnel, a cut of about 9 percent.
In serious criminal cases,
the number of guilty pleas and convictions have fallen 54.8 percent
since 2001. In the first four years of the Bush administration, the
federal government averaged 3.5 criminal convictions a year; in the
four years before that, the average was 7.75 per year.
What's more, Think Progress reported
that Bush further tipped his hat to Big Coal last September, when he
put Richard Stickler in charge of MSHA. Stickler, another insider, had
spent 30 years with BathEnergy Mines. The United Mine Workers, one story said,
"noted that mines managed by Stickler showed a 'very poor compliance
record' and cited government numbers demonstrating that one such
operation, Eagle's Nest in Boone county, West Virginia, reported
injuries at double the national average."
When it wasn't relaxing regulations, ignoring warnings or otherwise pandering to its corporate masters, the administration was busy doing nothing about the exponentially increased violations at the Sago mine. For instance, federal officials cited
billionaire Wilbur Ross's recently reopened mine 208 times in 2005, up
from 68 the year prior. Twenty-one of those 208 citations covered the
increase of combustible materials, which played a part in Monday's
tragedy. The corresponding fines were laughable, the largest being
$440. Negligence writ large, and negligence largely unpunished.
If you're a coal company and you scratch the president's back, he'll scratch yours.
A year from now, after nothing has happened, White House officials
will forget the lessons they failed to learn, returning to business as
usual. And tragedy will strike again.
