Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes three-part series on coal mining, safety and politics

Daniel Malloy and Dennis B. Roddy, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, have written a three-part series on coal mining and its issues, beginning with a profile of a miner from Baileysville, W.Va. Adam Vance, 28, married his high school sweetheart, they bought a house and had a child. After a lay-off, Vance decided to look for work in mining, "The only thing really going at the time was underground. That's where I went."  Today he draws between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. Life is good, if not always safe. The work can be dirty, grueling, dark and dangerous, yet like so many others who go underground, Adam Vance finds dignity in bringing coal to the surface, write Malloy and Roddy. (Read more)

Part two is a look at how environmentalists and the coal mining industry differ, and the complexities of finding common ground. They share at least one thing, though: unease at the Obama administration's approach to mining. Friends of Coal proclaims on billboards, "Don't let Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats take away our coal jobs." Environmentalists felt that candidates in the recent W.Va. election competed "to see who could bow most majestically before the throne of King Coal." Among the differences between the two groups: cap-and-trade; environmental pollution; employment issues; activists from outside the region; reality of "clean coal." (Read more)

In the concluding third part, the Mine Safety and Health Administration is described as having a "newfound aggressiveness" in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 miners. The agency has targeted 111 mines with high rates of safety violations. "This has sent shock waves through the mining industry. Companies are worried they'll be the next one," beginning with Massey Energy's Freedom Mine No. 1, in Pike County, Ky. Tony Oppegard, a former MSHA official and onetime mine safety prosecutor in Kentucky, told the reporters. MSHA Inspectors "swarmed over some locations, sometimes seizing mine telephones to prevent guards from warning foremen underground about their arrival. But it was the move to shut down the Freedom Mine that was the most striking display of MSHA's newly aggressive law enforcement," according to Malloy and Roddy.  (Read more)