Mine disaster coverage focuses on Massey's safety record and its CEO's controversies

Most national news coverage of the explosion that killed at least 25 West Virginia coal miners and left four others missing has shifted to the safety record of the mine and Massey Energy, with some mentions of other controversies involving CEO Don Blankenship, left.

Four years ago, after a series of mine disasters, Congress passed the first sweeping changes to mine safety laws in 30 years, but those reforms weren't enough to protect the miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine near Montcoal in Raleigh County, Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette reports. So what happened? "It tells me one of two things," longtime mine safety crusader Davitt McAteer of Wheeling Jesuit University, who ran the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton years, told Ward. "One, the law isn't being enforced or, two, the law didn't go far enough." McAteer, an academic partner of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, appeared on all three major broadcast networks' evening news programs.

The mine was written up more than 50 times last month for safety violations, and 12 of those citations involved "problems with ventilating the mine and preventing a buildup of deadly methane," Steve Munson, Jerry Markon and Ed O'Keefe of The Washington Post write.  Two miners who asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs told The New York Times the mine had been evacuated three times in the past two months because of dangerously high methane levels.  In total, the mine has been cited 112 times since the start of the year.

After state and Massey officials delayed revealing names of the dead, upsetting relatives, "Some of these tensions boiled over around 2 a.m. Tuesday when Mr. Blankenship arrived at the mine to announce the death toll to families who were gathered at the site," the Times' Ian Urbina reports. "Escorted by at least a dozen state and other police officers, according to several witnesses, Mr. Blankenship prepared to address the crowd, but people yelled at him for caring more about profits than miners’ lives. After another Massey official informed the crowd of the new death toll, one miner threw a chair. A father and son stormed off screaming that they were quitting mining work. And several people yelled at Mr. Blankenship that he was to blame." (Read more)
"Even aside from its abysmal safety record, Massey, and its leader . . .  are almost cartoonishly villainous in the way they approach everything from the environment to union rights to media scrutiny," Dylan Matthews, a Harvard student and Post researcher, writes. A 2005 memo from Blankenship to his underground mine superintendents has also received renewed media attention. "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal," Blankenship wrote. Overcasts, which carry forced air across passageways, are "critical to proper mine ventilation," Andrew Leonard points out on Salon.com. A second memo sent out a week later said safety was the company's "first responsibility" and any interpretation that the first memo deprioritized safety was incorrect, the Times noted.

In his first public comments Blankenship told MetroNews of Morgantown, "Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process. There are violations at every coal mine in America and UBB was a mine that had violations. I think the fact that MSHA, the state and our fire bosses and the best engineers that you can find were all in and around this mine and all believed it to be safe in the circumstances it was in speaks for itself as far as any suspicion that the mine was improperly operated." Blankenship has since appeared on several national television shows. Some coverage has noted his controversial involvement in West Virginia judicial elections and his denial of global warming.

MSHA hasn't gone without potential blame for the disaster. A government audit released last week said the agency is "is not properly tracking the retraining of its veteran inspectors and is facing a mounting backlog of appeals of health and safety violations from mining companies," O'Keefe reports for the Post. Speculation that the disaster could spur new mine safety reforms has run rampant, but lawmakers cautioned Tuesday it was too early say for sure, reports Mannix Porterfield of the Beckley Register-Herald, the local newspaper in Raleigh County.

The coverage includes some useful and illuminating resources. The Times has a multimedia graphic showing the mine map, the surrounding terrain and where bodies have been found. WSAZ-TV in Huntington is live-streaming all news conferences at the mine on its Web site. The Gazette has created a special Web page for ongoing coverage of the disaster, and Ward has extensive coverage on his Coal Tattoo blog. MSHA has also created a Web page for relevant documents about the mine's safety record.

Here's a little rural journalism, in a big-city paper, about the disaster: Author Denise Giardina, writer in residence at West Virginia State University, writes on the Times op-ed page, "we are a national sacrifice area. We mine coal despite the danger to miners, the damage to the environment and the monomaniacal control of an industry that keeps economic diversity from flourishing here. We do it because America says it needs the coal we provide. West Virginians get little thanks in return. Our miners have historically received little protection, and our politicians remain subservient to Big Coal. Meanwhile, West Virginia is either ignored by the rest of the nation or is the butt of jokes about ignorant hillbillies." (Read more)