Thirteen grants totaling $1 million have been awarded to promote U.S. mine safety.
The U.S. Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced the funding Tuesday through its Brookwood-Sago grant program.
The program was established in 2006 in honor of 25 miners who died in 2001 in Brookwood, Alabama, at the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine and in 2006 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, at the Sago Mine.
Among the grants awarded were $140,000 to the University of Arizona in Tucson for the development of app-based training materials, $130,000 to Marshall University Research Corp. in Huntington, for production of a video on safety and emergency preparedness, and $120,000 to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City to provide virtual reality training materials.
Other grant recipients include schools, state agencies and other groups in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.
Just a few months ago, the U.S. coal mining industry was on track for its safest year in history. But in an eleven-day span in late December, three miners died after separate incidents, bringing the total number of fatalities in 2018 to 12, even as coal mining employment continued its decline.
“It is a reminder to enforcement agencies and companies who are responsible for miner safety that you always have to be vigilant, you can never let up your guard,” Kentucky lawyer and mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard said.
Despite that grim end to 2018, federal mine safety records show the number of fatalities in U.S. coal mines last year tied the second-lowest mark on record. Twelve miners died in 2015. The lowest number of fatalities for a year came in 2016, when 8 miners were killed. Fifteen miners were killed on the job in 2017.
The numbers are low compared to just a little more than a decade ago, when dozens of miners perished year after year. The mining industry and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA, point to improvements in mine safety practices.
However, the number of miners employed was also lower in 2018. Preliminary data from MSHA indicate total coal mine employment in 2018 reached the lowest level in the industry’s modern history. Oppegard said he thinks that is the primary reason for the reduction in deaths.
“I think the low number says more about the decline of the coal industry,” Oppegard said. “Certainly in Appalachia there’s about one-fifth the number of mines that are operating today than were in operation five or six years ago. So I think that’s the major reason.”
A comparison of mining employment and fatalities demonstrates Oppegard’s point. In 2009, for example, the total annual fatalities fell below 20 for the first time in industry history. When 18 miners were killed in that year, the industry employed roughly 134,000, for a death rate of 13.4 per 100,000 workers.
The unofficial employment figures for 2018 show just 80,762 employed by coal operators and contracting companies. That means the death rate for 2018, at 14.8, was slightly higher than in 2009.
Mine safety and health made news in 2018 in other ways that safety advocates found worrisome, as the Trump administration’s leadership at MSHA made controversial decisions and the toll from Appalachia’s epidemic of black lung disease continued to mount.
Credit U.S. Mine Health & Safety Administration
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A 34-year-old miner was crushed when a vehicle turned over in the Oaktown Fuels Mine, in Terre Haute, Ind.
‘Troubling Development’
In December, the United Mine Workers of America sued MSHA after the agency reduced its heightened oversight of a West Virginia coal mine with a poor safety record.
The suit has to do with MSHA’s use of its power to declare mines with a history of significant safety violations as having a “Pattern of Violations.” Known as “POV status,” the declaration is an enforcement tool that allows the agency to increase regulatory scrutiny at a mine.
That was the case with the Pocahontas Coal Company’s Affinity mine in southern West Virginia in 2013. Under the Obama administration, MSHA placed Affinity on POV status after two miners were killed in separate incidents within a two-week span.
This year, under the Trump administration, MSHA decided to remove POV status for the Affinity mine in an agreement with the company that resolved litigation on the matter, despite a continued record of spotty safety performance at the mine.
The decision raised questions about MSHA director David Zatezalo’s connections to the mining industry. Zatezalo is a former coal company executive who also served on state coal associations involved in litigation against MSHA over its use of POV status.
“That’s a troubling development,” Oppegard said. “It shows me MSHA, under this administration, is willing to give sweetheart deals to coal companies.”
Also in December, an NPR investigation found that the surging epidemic of black lung among Central Appalachian miners had topped 2,000 known cases of the most severe form of the disease.
The incoming Democratic chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, said he will call hearings on black lung in the new Congress.
“Congress has no choice but to step in and direct MSHA and the mining industry to take timely action,” Scott said in a statement.
MSHA declined to make an official available for an interview for this story.
‘Personal Tragedies’
Four of the twelve coal mining fatalities in 2018 took place in mines in West Virginia and three in Pennsylvania. Other fatalities were in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, and Washington.
MSHA records show the miners were killed during a range of work in both surface and underground mines, and the incidents included deaths from electrocution, crushing, rock falls, fires, and powered haulage of personnel and materials. In at least two cases miners died in mishaps while riding in the personnel carriers that either flipped or collided with mine equipment.
Credit U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration
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A rock fall killed a 52-year old miner at Arch Coal’s Sentinel Mine in Barbour County, W.Va.
Oppegard said that even while coal mining employment decreases, each working miner still deserves a safe work environment. He added that while MSHA defines a “mining disaster” as an event that kills five or more, each individual fatality brings personal tragedy.
“Each one of those deaths was a disaster to that family,” he said.
The federal agency that oversees mining safety is holding public stakeholder meetings in six states, including West Virginia.
The Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration is seeking information on safety improvements with hauling vehicles and bulldozers at surface mines and belt conveyors at surface and underground mines.
The West Virginia meeting is Sept. 11 at the National Mine Health and Safety Academy in Beckley.
The other meetings in August and September will be held in Alabama, Texas, Nevada, New York and Arlington, Virginia. The agency says it is part of a larger initiative that MSHA is undertaking to reduce accidents involving powered haulage.
Those type of accidents accounted for half of the 28 mining fatalities in 2017.
Two mines owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice were among three across the state that missed the deadline for installing life-saving technology to prevent miners from being crushed by machinery in underground coal mines.
Violation reports say two mines in McDowell County, Pay Car 57 and Pay Car 58, missed the deadline to install proximity detection systems. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Tuesday the state’s deadline matches the March 16 U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration deadline.
State Department of Commerce spokeswoman Samantha Smith says the third mine was installing detection systems as of April 10.
Smith says Pay Car 58 installed the systems and was producing coal again. Pay Car 57 wasn’t producing coal and hadn’t been refitted with the new technology.
A spokesman for Justice didn’t respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
A federal report says the wall that crushed a miner to death in West Virginia earlier this year wasn’t properly supported.
The U.S. Department of Labor report released Thursday says the February 6 death of 52-year-old Leonard W. Griffith was the result of an unsupported 18-feet-by-7-feet (5.49-meters-by-2.13-meters) mine wall falling down. Citing the report, the Charleston Gazette-Mail says Griffith had been performing “routine maintenance” when the wall fell and pinned him beneath it.
Griffith had been working at Sentinel Mine, an underground mine in Barbour County owned by Wolf Run Mining LLC. Wolf Run has been cited for violated federal standards that protect miners against working under unsupported roofs or walls. The report says the mine operator has altered support plans to secure the mine’s walls.
Seven U.S. coal miners died in accidents so far this year, most of them with less than a year of experience at that particular job and mine, according to federal officials. In all of last year, eight miners died.
Tim Watkins, deputy administrator for Coal Mine Safety and Health, said Thursday they’re launching an initiative as soon as possible to talk to miners and try to determine if there are training deficiencies.
“Our intent is to talk to every single one of them, every miner who falls into one of these categories,” Watkins said. “We’ll need a great amount of assistance from mine operators.”
Six of the seven miners had worked at the respective mines for less than one year, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration report. Five had less than one year experience in the particular job they were doing.
“With the market the way it is, people are moving around, they are having to move people, people are doing different jobs,” Watkins said at a stakeholder meeting in southern West Virginia.
Three deaths occurred at surface mines, three at underground mines and one at a surface mine processing facility, federal officials said.
In a January accident, a 42-year-old miner was positioned between a conveyor belt drive and its safety guard when he came in contact with the drive roller and was fatally injured, federal officials reported. In May, a miner hit his head on the mine roof or roof support when he was traveling in a trolley-powered supply locomotive.
Four deaths this year were in West Virginia, two in Kentucky, one in Montana.
Last year’s total of eight coal miner deaths was a historic low, Watkins said.
Other MSHA data show 931 miners were injured over a recent nine-month period had with less than one year experience at that mine, dropping to 418 injured with two years’ experience at a particular mine and only 83 with a decade of experience.
