04-7-10 by dugan
It’s not just mountaintops blown to smithereens and drinking water polluted. Cheap coal’s price is also the the 25 miners known dead, plus four more feared dead, in Monday’s West Virginia underground explosion, and scores of miners still missing in last week’s China disaster. "Cheap" means a deliberate refusal to put safety first in mining, much less pay for pollution reductions. Here are some of the irrefutable facts about the West Virginia mine and its owner, Massey Energy:
From USA Today:
The Upper Big Branch mine in Monday’s tragedy had the worst safety
record of any underground coal mine in its county, according to a story
by USA TODAY colleague Thomas Frank, citing federal documents. On 54
occasions since Jan. 1, 2009, he reports, federal inspectors shut part
of it because of safety violations.It has been cited for 3,007 safety violations since 1995, and its owner, Richmond-based Massey Energy, is contesting 353 of them, says an analysis of
Mine Safety and Health Administration data by the Think Progress blog
of the Center for American Progress Action Fund…
How did Massey Energy respond to all of these violations, many of them described as serious (including high levels of explosive coal dust and methane, the presumptive causes of the explosion)?
From Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times:
In "An Oct. 19, 2005, company memo … all of the company’s deep mine
superintendents — including at Upper Big Branch — were put on notice
by Massey Chief Executive Don Blankenship that coal production trumped
any other concerns.If they got instructions "to do anything other than run coal . . . you
need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because
we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills." A week later,
however, Blankenship sent a follow-up memo, saying that safety is the
first responsibility.
Which of those conflicting instructions would be regarded as "real" by mine superintendents? Which one clearly represents management’s view?
There may be statistically fewer underground mining tragedies in the last few decades than previously, but that’s largely because so much coal is now retrieved by blowing apart mountains, then going in to retrieve the coal. Yet neither human lives nor loss of habitats, landscapes and communities is included in the dollar price of cheap coal. And the PR campaign for "clean coal" is a sham.
The coal industry just keeps on boasting that coal is cheap, for instance in a new $2 million ad campaign aimed at halting an effort in Colorado to switch more power plants to cleaner natural gas. But their definition of affordable the one that has CEOs telling mine overseers not to "do anything other than run coal."