Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster

Preface to the Paperback Edition

 P R E FA C E T O T H E PA P E R B A C K E D I T I O N At 3:02 p.m. on Easter Monday, April 5, 2010, an explosion of great magnitude ripped through the Upper Big Branch coal mine, owned and operated by Massey Energy and located on the Boone-Raleigh county line in southwest West Virginia. Twenty-nine miners died and one was profoundly injured. On April 13, 2010, then-Governor Joe Manchin, III, asked me to conduct an independent investigation into this disaster, the largest in the United States in forty years. I had conducted two earlier inquiries at Governor Manchin ’s request. The first involved the 2006 explosion at the Sago mine where twelve men were killed and one was gravely injured. The second examined the causes of a 2006 fire at the Aracoma Alma mine, also owned and operated by Massey Energy, which resulted in the deaths of two miners. As we said in our independent report of the Upper Big Branch disaster (www.nttc.edu/ubb/default.asp) released in May 2011, the explosion was no accident. Those twenty-nine men were killed because officials of a rogue coal company disregarded worker safety in the drive to produce coal. But that’s not the entire story. The UBB miners also died because regulators—both from xiv preface to the paperback edition the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration and the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety, and Training—abdicated their responsibility of making sure the operator complied with minimum fundamental safety requirements. The late Senator Robert C. Byrd once said, “The test of a great country such as ours is how serious we are about protecting those among us who are most at risk. . . . Those men and women who bravely labor in such dangerous occupations as coal mining to provide our country with critical energy should be protected from exploitation by private companies with callous attitudes about health and safety.” Since the Upper Big Branch explosion, the United States Congress has failed to take any action. Before his death, Senator Byrd introduced legislation aimed at serial safety violators like Massey Energy, which operated UBB. The bill went nowhere, as has subsequent safety legislation. Bills re-introduced in 2013 in both the House and Senate stand little chance of passage. Republicans and Democrats appear to be engaged in an endless debate as to whether to strengthen legislation or ensure that current laws are enforced. The answer is that both should be done. There is no excuse for MSHA’s failure to enforce the law at UBB when inspectors walked past massive accumulations of coal dust, uncovered manipulations of the mine’s ventilation system, and were made aware of previous gas outbursts. Stronger legislation is also needed. One thing the Upper Big Branch disaster laid bare is the fact that high-ranking company officials who make decisions about safety in their mines are shielded from accountability when things go terribly wrong. The disasters at Monongah and UBB are close parallels ; both explosions were a result of immense accumulations of coal dust and a failure to control ignition sources. The passage of 103 years between Monongah and UBB has not obscured the fact that if mine operators neglect basic safety principles, miners die. preface to the paperback edition xv Upper Big Branch also offered compelling evidence that miners are not being adequately protected against black lung disease. Autopsies showed that of the twenty-four victims who had sufficient lung tissue to examine seventyone percent had evidence of black lung, including men in their early twenties who had worked only at that mine. This new epidemic has occurred on MSHA’s watch. Although the agency has received massive funding to keep miners safe and healthy, it has not been able to compete with the energy industry’s powerful lobby in Congress and state legislatures and has been unable to bring meaningful regulatory changes to a broken system. Here again the parallels between 1907 and 2010 are striking. Coal industry lobbying then and now has played an outsized role in the nation’s capital and in coal state capitals. While health and safety has improved in the decades since Monongah, our nation’s miners are not nearly as safe or as healthy as they should be. Lethal coal mine explosions should be events of a distant...