The U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration has begun to assemble a team of investigators to comb the cavernous Sago mine and sift its charred tunnels for clues to what caused Monday’s deadly explosion.
MSHA officials say the team will seek to determine if the mine’s safety record played a role in the blast. They will look at how emergency information was relayed about the trapped miners’ conditions. And they will examine whether the mine company properly conducted “pre-shift examinations” that measure methane and oxygen levels in the mine before workers descend.
The 44 hours after the blast saw a whirlwind of activity – a heroic but failed rescue effort, and a tumultuous family vigil that careened from despair to jubilation then rage when the deaths of 12 miners were confirmed.
But if past mine disasters are any guide, the pending federal investigation will take many months and be shrouded in secrecy, even as bereaved families clamor for information.
Few known facts have been made public, so it was impossible Wednesday to tell what direction the probe may take.
It is not yet clear, for example, whether the miners had turned on their electrical equipment in the mine.
The explosion reportedly occurred in an abandoned portion of the mine called the “gob” where coal refuse is sealed.
High levels of methane can build up in those sections, and there has been speculation that a lightning bolt shot into the gob through a well hole or ventilation tube.
But there is no shortage of possible causes. In the dark, subterranean shafts, miners learn to sense a host of hidden dangers. Plumes of combustible coal powder can stretch for hundreds of feet through the tunnels.
Methane is a naturally occurring byproduct of the coal, and invisible, odorless pockets of the gas will build to explosive levels if a mine is not properly ventilated.
A spark touched off by a random rock fall can transform the mix of gas and coal dust into a fireball.
The Sago mine is in the heart of America’s Appalachian coal cradle, where mine deaths and injuries remain a stubborn fact of life.
Even as many of America’s underground coal mines slowly improve their safety records, Eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia have been plagued by high injury rates and safety violations linked to company negligence, a 2002 Chicago Tribune investigation of mine safety found.
That is because the mines in the area have narrow seams that have been heavily mined.
Many are run by cash-strapped companies that scrimp on safety.
The coal mines of that region, which produced about a quarter of the nation’s coal from underground mines between 1998 and 2000, accounted for two-fifths of the citations given those mines for “unwarrantable failure” to comply with federal safety laws, the Tribune found. Those were cases in which coal operators showed reckless disregard, intentional misconduct or serious lack of care.
Sago has had a shifting set of owners. Anker West Virginia Mining Co. operated it until about two months ago, when International Coal Group Inc. bought it.
But in the last two years it has been cited for serious safety violations, including faulty roof supports and ventilation breaches that allow gas and coal dust to build. Roughly a third of Sago’s 273 citations during the last two years have been for “significant and substantial” safety violations, MSHA records show.
And the problems appear to have been getting worse. In the first half of 2005, MSHA cited the mine for 75 violations, 35 of which were classified as “significant and substantial.” In the second half of the year, there were 133 citations, 61 of which were “significant and substantial.”
Among these were a growing number of “unwarrantable failure” citations: three in the first half of the year, and 13 in the second half.
International Coal Group chief executive Bennett Hatfield has defended the mine’s safety record and told reporters that there had been “a dramatic improvement” since his company took control.
“Much of the bad history you’re talking about was beyond our reach and ability to control,” Hatfield told reporters Tuesday.
Any fines the government might ultimately levy because of the accident will likely be whittled down in an arcane administrative review process that tends to favor mine companies.
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In 2002, for example, MSHA investigators made headlines when they levied $440,000 worth of fines against the Brookwood, Ala., Jim Walter Resources firm for infractions that led to a 2001 explosion that claimed 13 lives. But those fines were reduced to $3,000 in a little-noted November 2005 decision by an official from the federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.
Although the Sago team has not been named, past MSHA investigation teams have included experts on ventilation, electrical equipment and the engineering of mine roof supports.
In addition to gathering and analyzing evidence, they will take testimony from the Sago mine’s other 130-or-so workers, asking them about conditions in the place. Although federal laws allow those interview sessions to be public, mine companies have generally succeeded in keeping them private.
Because much of the testimony taken in the closed-door sessions may never be made public, past investigations have been criticized for secrecy and bias.
Joseph E. Main, former administrator of health and safety for the United Mine Workers union, said the closed investigations don’t always get at the truth.
“This is a disaster that needs to be aired in the public,” Main said, “because that would flush out a better quality of facts.”
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.
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