CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Feds
Launch Criminal Probe Into Massey Energy Mine Deaths
20 Corporate Crime Reporter
26(4), June 23, 2006
Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the January deaths
of two miners at a Massey Energy mine in Logan County, West Virginia, according
to a report
broadcast last week on West Virginia Public Radio.
The mine had recurrent problems with broken or missing fire fighting equipment.
According to the report, the state had fined Aracoma Coal’s Number One
mine 28 times for bad fire equipment over the last two and a half years.
One former miner told West Virginia Public Radio’s Dan Heyman that the
water hoses did not work when the workers needed them to get the deadly blaze
under control.
Heyman said that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had requested
a federal criminal probe after it issued several citations in its own review
of the fire.
There was a similar fire on the same belt line at the same mine one month before
the deadly fire.
A former miner at the mine, Brandon Conley, told Heyman that the exact same
thing happened on December 23, 2005.
“The same exact thing that happened on the 23rd,” Conley said. “I
could see all kinds of belt shavings, pretty much flaming. And there was all
kinds of smoke, pretty thick smoke. My CO monitor was going off.”
Conley quit Aracoma, a subsidiary of Massey, soon after the deadly January fire,
saying he did not want to go back to work where his friends died.
The fire hose did not match up to the water line,” Conley said of the
December 23 fire. “And I can tell you that the fire suppression and also
the management knows that the fire suppression on that particular belt did not
work.”
Conley says he had to scramble to find fire extinguishers.
He told Heyman that he barely managed to bring that fire under control.
Over the last two and a half years, West Virginia inspectors have cited the
mine 28 times for problems related to firefighting equipment or training.
Thirteen of those violations were for missing fire hoses or missing valves that
are needed to connect hoses to water lines, the problem that Conley described.
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