Legal News

On Citations, Appeals and the West Virginia Mine Disaster

By Ashby Jones

The situation in Montcoal, W.Va., grows grimmer by the moment, it seems. As the WSJ reports on Wednesday, it’s unlikely that rescuers are going to be able to pull out safely the four missing miners following the coal mine explosion on Monday. Already, twenty-five miners are known to have died in the blast.

Now the spotlight is slowly swinging back to the Massey Energy Company, which runs the Upper Big Branch mine, the site of the accident.

According to the WSJ story, the Upper Big Branch mine has a history of citations involving the ventilation of methane, which is found naturally in coal seams.

The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the Massey mine for hundreds of violations in recent years, including 10 so far this year related to legal requirements for ventilation systems to control methane and highly explosive coal dust. The step-up in oversight is partly the result, reports the NYT in a story Wednesday, of tougher federal mining laws passed in 2006.

But the NYT reports that many mine companies have taken an aggressive approach to the new regulatory regime, by appealing more of the citations issued. Massey appealed at least 37 of the 50 citations for serious safety violations that it received last year, according to the NYT. The NYT reports that:

One in four citations issued against coal mines are now appealed by operators - three times the appeal rate before the law, according to regulators. The result is a backlog of 18,000 pending appeals and $210 million in contested penalties.

At a hearing in February, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, complained that about the appeals, saying they threatened to "render the federal efforts to hold mine operators accountable meaningless."

But, according to the NYT, the operators blamed the government for the increasing appeals. Don Blankenship (pictured), the company's chief executive (and he of the case that started the recusal situation that roiled the West Virginia Supreme Court, and ultimately wound up in the lap of the U.S. Supreme Court (click here)) , cautioned in a radio interview Tuesday against reading too much into the Upper Big Branch mine's history of violations.

"Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process," Blankenship said, adding that there are violations at every coal mine in the country.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 07, 2010 (boomark / email).