U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors had gone more than five months without doing a complete review of safety at a coal mine in Logan County, West Virginia, where a worker died on Sunday, reports Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette.
MSHA must perform a "complete inspection of every underground coal mine once per quarter," but inspectors had missed those inspections in the last two quarters at the Mountaineer II Mine of Arch Coal Inc., Ward reports. On Sunday, Robert D. Fraley, 53, died after he fell about 350 feet down an airshaft that was under construction. This was the second time in September that a miner died in a West Virginia mine where inspections had been missed. It also was the second fatal shaft-construction accident nationally in the last six weeks. MSHA reports that shaft construction has the highest accident rates of all coal-ming work.
Ward explains that while federal officials had conducted many “spot inspections,” those reviews are not as thorough as the required quarterly inspections. After the first worker's death at a mine where inspections were missed, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., railed against MSHA. “I’m absolutely flabbergasted — flabbergasted,” Byrd told MSHA chief Richard Stickler. “I’m at a loss. “How can we have any faith that things at MSHA are improving if you’re not even fulfilling these basic inspection responsibilities?” (Read more)
No comments:
Post a Comment