Two Massey officials went inside mine immediately after April explosion

In the hours following the April explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners, two Massey officials re-entered the mine unsupervised for four hours, National Public Radio reports. The two officials "traveled nine miles underground and reached the area of the longwall mining machine that is considered a possible source of the explosion," Howard Berkes of NPR writes. "They remained underground even after the Mine Safety and Health Administration issued a so-called (k) order closing the mine to all but official rescuers and authorized activity."

The officials were "Chris Blanchard, president of the Massey Energy subsidiary that manages the Upper Big Branch mine, and Jason Whitehead, who was director of underground performance at the time and is now a Massey vice president," Berkes writes. Massey would not make Blanchard and Whitehead available for an interview but company Vice President and General Counsel Shane Harvey told NPR they "risked their lives to save fellow coal miners. ... These rescue efforts were their one and only objective." Kevin Stricklin, chief of coal mine safety for MSHA, told Berkes it's not known whether Blanchard or Whitehead did anything wrong in the mine but "there's a question that's gonna come up of whether there was any tampering that took place."

Blanchard, Whitehead and other Massey officials found one severely injured miner in the first group of victims about three-quarters of a mile inside. The group attended to the miner who was eventually led to safety before Blanchard and Whitehead proceeded deeper into the mine, Berkes writes. "The impulse is to get into the mine and see if you can bring people out alive," Ed Clair, who spent 22 years as the chief lawyer at MSHA. "My own view is that it was irresponsible for them to be there. With the best of intentions, they clearly took extreme risk with their own lives and with the lives of rescuers." MSHA official Stricklin explained, "I was emphatic that I wanted those two guys out of there. And at the time, it was more for their safety than ... that I thought anything was being tampered with." (Read more)