Shafts of Death

Remember the Quecreek coal mine disaster in Pennsylvania last July? It left 9 miners trapped 300 feet underground in rushing, frigid waters for more than 3 days. Bush rushed from his Crawford Ranch for a photo op with the rescued miners in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, looking for a repeat of his performance at Ground Zero, the crowning moment of his presidency.

"What took place here in Pennsylvania really represents the best of our country, what I call the spirit of America," Bush proclaimed. Then he sped off to a $1.5 million Republican fundraiser in Philadelphia.

What took place in Quecreek was no "accident," merely lethal normalcy, business-as-usual for the industry in the coal fields of Appalachia, where mine-and-run corporations send their workers down to extract every last yard of coal from dwindling coal seams.

The Black Wolf Mining Company, a non-union operation, tried to pin the blame for the disaster on bad maps provided by the state of Pennsylvania, which led the mining crew to drill into the adjacent Saxman mine, abandoned in the 1950s and filled with 60 million gallons of water, which sluiced at 60 miles per hour into the Quecreek mine.

But that excuse won't wash. For one thing, officials at the company and federal regulators at the Mine Safety and Health Administration had been aware since at least 1999 that those maps were dangerously inaccurate. And in the days leading up to the disaster, the miners themselves had warned the company.

"The mine was wet from the very beginning," says Ronald Hileman, one of the rescued miners. Hileman testified to Senate investigators that the crew boss had told executives at the mining company about the bad condition at least twice before the collapse.

Black Wolf has been described in the press as a struggling local company. This is nonsense. It's part of the coal industry's echo to Enron's structure, a series of shell corporations and subsidiaries designed to maximize profits for the partners and shield them from liability.

Black Wolf, which has only been around for a year and has already racked up 21 serious safety violations, operates the mine. It's run by David Rebuck, an executive at Mincorp, an international mining conglomerate. Mincorp owns PBS Coal, which has operated in Pennsylvania for decades. PBS Coal controls Quecreek Mining, which owns the mine. Quecreek subcontracts the operations of the mine to Black Wolf. The parent company, Mincorp, is a spinoff from the British coal giant, Burnett and Hallamshire, once the darling of international financiers. It went belly-up in an Enron-style accounting scandal in the late 1980s.

The mining company's executives didn't even call the miners after they were pulled from the pit. Instead, they whined to the press that liabilities from the catastrophe might force them into bankruptcy unless they could find a way to cut costs.

Cost-cutting in mining means injury or death for the men down the shaft. The miners well knew Bush's plans to slash safety funding by more than 6 percent, most of it coming from the coal mine enforcement division. The man Bush picked to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration, David Lauriski, is a long-time coal industry executive and lobbyist.

Shortly after taking office, Lauriski bragged to a group of coal industry executives that his regulatory agenda "is quite a bit shorter than some past agendas." Indeed, death warrants usually tend towards brevity. Part of Lauriski's abbreviated agenda is to reduce the number of times a mining company has to sample coal dust levels inside the tunnels, a move that is certain to increase incidence of black lung disease. And yes, Lauriski wants to get rid of the chest X-ray program that tests miners for black lung disease.

Lauriski also wants to slash the number of mine inspectors by 25 percent, even though the lack of inspections my have been partially responsible for the Quecreek disaster. Under current guidelines, the MSHA is required to inspect mines at least four times a year. But an investigation by a Pittsburgh television station revealed that it had been more than a year since federal inspectors had visited the Quecreek mine.

In addition to Lauriski, Bush also tapped Stan Suboleski for a seat on the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. Suboleski is an executive with the A.C. Massey Coal Company which, according to the United Mineworkers, has one of the worst safety records in the industry. Massey is also the company responsible for the annihilation of more than 70 miles of streams in eastern Kentucky when 300 million gallons of coal sludge spilled from one of its mines. It was the worst ecological disaster in the US since the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The planned dismantling of the MSHA comes at a time when coal-mining deaths are on the rise, 132 in the past 3 years. In the early part of the last century, more than 1,000 miners per year perished in the shafts. A US soldier during World War I had a better statistical chance of surviving the year than did a miner in the coal mines of West Virginia. Unions and mine safety laws turned things around.

But now the tide seems to be sliding back, abetted by an administration that is hostile to workers, unions, and mining regulations. In September 2001, 13 miners lost their lives in a coal mine explosion in Brookwood, Alabama. In the preceding months, federal mine inspectors had cited the mining company 31 times for safety violations, including citations for accumulations of free-floating coal dust that may have led to the fatal explosion. The feds issued warnings, but never took action against the company, following the Bush administration's script of voluntary compliance.

The United Mine Workers say the latest trend in the industry is to import low-wage workers from Latin America to work the tunnels of Kentucky and West Virginia, workers who don't join unions and who can't read maps (assuming these have any relation to reality).