BECKLEY, W.Va. — West Virginia mine safety officials issued 253 violations in their investigation of the Upper Big Branch disaster and targeted at least two foremen, saying their failures may have exacerbated the unsafe conditions underground before the explosion that killed 29 men.
The violations are included in a report released Thursday by the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. It’s the fourth and final report on the nation’s worst coal-mining disaster in four decades at Massey Energy’s mine near Montcoal.
The report comes the day after federal prosecutors charged the mine’s former superintendent with fraud and signaled they are going after other Massey employees, likely higher up the management ladder.
The state’s conclusions about the cause of the explosion largely mirror those of previous reports: The machine cutting through sandstone to reach the coal created the heat or spark that methane needed to ignite. Broken water sprayers then failed to stop the fireball from turning into a much more powerful series of explosions fueled by coal dust.
The report said foremen Ricky J. Foster and Terry W. Moore repeatedly failed to clean conveyor belts and apply rock dust to certain areas in the mine from December 2009 until the explosion on April 5, 2010. Mine operators use pulverized limestone to cover and neutralize highly explosive coal dust.
Contact information for the foremen or their attorneys was not immediately available.
State mine safety director C.A. Phillips said a third employee has also been targeted for individual violations, but he would not identify that person. By law, each of the three can be fined no more than $250.
Regulators have moved to decertify one of the miners, but Mr. Phillips would not say which.
Nor could his staff immediately tally up the proposed fines against Massey, now owned by Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources. However, the violations include 22 “special assessments,” which could result in fines of up to $10,000 apiece, and one automatic $100,000 penalty for failing to report the explosion within 15 minutes.
One of the “most disturbing facts” state investigators said they learned about rock-dusting practices at Upper Big Branch was the failure to treat one side of the longwall mining machine during the eight months it operated. Some 5,400 feet of the 6,700-foot-long coal panel was mined between September 2009 and April 2010 “without any record of rock dust being applied,” the report said.
Clay Mullins, whose brother Rex died in the mine, said he wants to see more prosecutions.
“They need to go all the way to the top,” he said - as high as former CEO Don Blankenship, who was known for micromanaging his mines and required managers to fax him production reports.
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